She looked back and saw him then, below her and diagonally across the airshaft. He was looking up toward her. He wore a dark hat. The light shining down from above made a shadow across his face.
Jane got quickly to her feet and backed into the corner beyond the door. She could see him no longer. She didn’t see him until he rounded the last turn and came up the final short flight. She saw the dark hat first and then the hard jaw, the thick dark-clad shoulders, then the hand sliding upward on the rail.
She took her shoe by the toe and hurled it with all her strength directly at his face. He moved his head to one side. It was a quick, practiced motion. He didn’t move it any further than necessary. The shoe hurtled by him and struck the wall and fell to the landing below. She had seen other men move like that, on the television screen, tiny figures who danced and tried to hit each other and seldom dodged more than was necessary.
He stopped at the landing level, five feet from her, facing her. He held his hand out. The golden cylinder lay on the white palm, glinting in the light.
“You drop this?” The voice was husky.
“Don’t come near me!”
“You come on down quiet.”
“Don’t come near me!”
As he reached for her she screamed. It rasped and hurt her throat. The airshaft enclosed the scream, dampening it, muting it, smothering it. It died quickly into echoes. A man draw breath to scream again the thick hand closed on hers in a deft, practiced way, shifted quickly and found position, then seemed to squeeze ever so gently. The gentleness sent a barbed shock of pain through her, a pain so clean and pure and distilled that it was as though someone had driven an icicle through the back of her hand. It turned the impending scream into a shocked whimper. It made her knees sag and the light waver.
“You come along nice,” he said.
He stood beside her, his arm under hers, his hand holding hers in a mockery of affection. He tried the door. They went together down the stairs, side by side. As they passed the door to the eleventh floor she wondered if she could twist away from him and get through it. Even as she thought of it and knew she couldn’t, some tension must have warned him. He pressed her hand again.
They started down to ten, circling the shaft, going down from landing to landing. He pushed the door open a few inches and put his eye close to the crack. He pushed it open the rest of the way and walked down the hail with her. A man stood by the elevator. He was tall. The elderly bellhop stood inside the elevator. A short, thick man stood in the hallway and watched them approach.
The short man stepped forward and took her purse. He started to look through it and the tall one took it away from him. They all got into the elevator. The man who held her moved her back against the wall. The tall one went carefully through her purse. The short one had said, “All the way down, pops.”
Jane said, “You can’t—” and stopped and bit her lip as the gentle pressure started again. Evidently they could and they would.
The short, thick one said, “Better-looking than in the papers, eh?”
“Shut up,” the tall one said.
The hand enclosed hers. It was a special indignity, this indignity of pain; peculiar humiliation. She realized that she should be looking at them closely, remembering things about them so she could identify them later if need be — or if she was lucky. But she could see nothing about them to remember. Just their, general sizes and their subdued clothes. They all had hard, closed faces. They could have been, each one of them, twenty-five or forty.
They moved out into the lobby. The tall one turned back to the operator. “Pops, shut yourself in that thing and go up and park it between floors for fifteen minutes. Move!”
“Yes sir,” the old man said. He banged the door shut hurriedly and the arrow pointed steadily upward.
They moved across to the desk. A fourth man was behind the desk, standing next to the old clerk. The clerk’s face was ghastly. It looked like oiled chalk. The man turned the clerk around roughly and shoved him into the small room behind the desk, pulled the door shut and locked it. He came out and the five of them walked the remaining steps to the outside door. Jane walked with two ahead of her, one beside her and one behind her.
“She have it?” asked the one who had been behind the desk.
“Shut up,” the tall one said. “Take a look outside, Boats.” The short, thick one went out first. He looked in each direction up and down the dark road, ducking his head instinctively against the driving rain. He looked back and nodded.
They moved out quickly. The wet sidewalk soaked Jane’s stocking feet. Rain cut at her legs. The car was across the street. They hurried to it. She was as shocked as the ones with her seemed to be when the bright headlights behind them and ahead of them went on suddenly, pinning them there in the glare, and a monstrous and demoralizing voice, boosted by amplification to gigantic authority, said out of the darkness, “Don’t move. Don’t move a muscle.”
The tall one cursed softly and turned and dived toward the protecting darkness. A shot kicked his legs out from under him. Jane heard the sick sound as his head hit the pavement. He lay there on his face, still in the lights, rolling his head back and forth and saying, “Aaaah!” Quite softly.
“Want to try for two?” the great voice roared. “Both ends of this street are blocked and the alleys are blocked and there are twenty-five armed men watching you. Now, hands high, children.”
For a moment the heavy hand still encased hers. Then it relaxed and went away and she stood apart from him. She saw him put his hands up. She felt as if she should, too. There was that much authority in the voice.
“Miss Bayliss, please walk toward the curb and turn to your left on the sidewalk. Thank you.”
She walked as she was told. She felt small, wet-footed and humiliated. She felt as if half a world watched her. She walked into darkness and into arms that were at once familiar, that held her there in the rain in a dear and remembered way, walked into lips that pressed against damp hair and said things she had never listened to closely enough before all this, and would listen to much more closely from now on.
“What are you doing up?” she demanded.
“Hush, honey. Tilt your head up to be kissed. Lord, you’ve shrunk!”
“No shoes,” she sighed happily and presented lips to be kissed, curling her wet toes against the dark sidewalk.
Chapter Six
This was no traditional morning office of the law, with its scarred golden oak, its yellowed pictures of the pistol team. This was a big room, done in pale, efficient green with many gray steel desks in military array, with banks of gray filing cabinets, with men who worked at the desks and used the telephone a great deal, with girls who walked briskly and found things in files.
Jane and Howard had to wait nearly an hour in the small fenced-off waiting room until a girl came and got them and took them to Sergeant Dolan’s desk somewhere in the middle of the big room. Two chairs had been placed near his desk. They sat down at Dolan’s terse invitation. Jane felt humble and a bit silly.
Dolan hung up the phone and smiled at them. “How is it going, kids? Tired of making statements?”
“Do you need more!” Jane exclaimed.
“No. We got all we need now. I could be official and mysterious and tell you to read all about it in the papers.”
“Please don’t!” she said.
“Well, it goes this way. We knew the killing was clean and professional, and we suspected that the body was that of a known criminal. We had that hunch. We didn’t know him, so he was from out of town. I talked to Locatta and got him to agree to go along with playing it stupid. Girl can identify killer. All that. I felt I could do it because I’ve got good men and I knew I could cover you every minute of the day. You were bait. You even spotted one of them outside your apartment. So imagine how I felt when you wiggled off the hook. That was a neat trick, that shoe-store stunt, and on account of you, three good men took a peeling they’ll never forget.”