The usher was saying behind him, “But they didn’t go out. They came as far as here and I opened the door for them, then they changed their minds and went upstairs to the balcony—”
So the cordon had just beaten him to it. But he’d seen them before they saw him, and had doubled back in again — with her! Merrill didn’t feel any relief at the knowledge that he was still in the theater with her. Quite the opposite. She was almost certainly a goner, now that the man was trapped!
“I think she’d been taken sick,” the usher was babbling unasked. “She looked pretty white, and she kept sort of leaning against him wherever they went. I tried to ask her if she wanted a doctor, but they’d gone upstairs before I had a chance—”
Merrill wasn’t listening. “The roof — he can get up there from the balcony, can’t he? There must be some way up!”
He gave a short, surreptitious whistle through the crack of the door, and one of the rubbernecks down by the display boards was suddenly vis-a-vis to him, as though he moved on invisible wires.
“He’s hep,” Merrill breathed through the slit. “The roof — tell them to throw men into the adjoining buildings quick and head him off. The roof is only two stories high and he can get out that way! I think that’s where he’s heading for—” And then a sort of choked cry broke from him against his will. “And if they see somebody with him up there in the dark, tell them — it’s my girl — will ya?” Instantly he pulled himself together again. “Lend me a gun, will you? I’m clean in here. I’m going after him inside!”
It was still warm from the other’s body. He pocketed it and went running up the branch of the stairs the usher had pointed to before.
Above, they deployed onto a mezzanine gallery, a long narrow space between the back of the theater and the sloping balcony seats, but walled off from the latter. Two arched openings, one at each end, led out to the seats, and in the middle, but set high up near the ceiling, was the squat, ponderous metal door guarding the projecting room, with just an ordinary, vertical iron ladder reaching to it.
The balcony usher who had been stealing a look at the picture as closing time neared, materialized guiltily at the far end; came running at the vicious swing of Merrill’s arm. “Two people just come up here from below, man and a woman?”
“No, nobody’s shown up here. They wouldn’t this late any more—”
“Then you missed ’em!” Merrill barked. “Show me how to get up to the roof!”
“Patrons aren’t allowed—”
“Show, or I’ll hang one on you!” He stiff-armed him for a head-start, and the brass-buttoned juvenile went stumbling at nearly a forty-five degree angle toward a panel stenciled No Admittance, just within one of the lateral passageways, leading toward the seats. It worked neither on hinges nor a knob, but on a vertical bolt running from top to bottom the entire length of it. Merrill hitched this up and shoved, but the way the thing resisted and the metallic snarling it rewarded him with was pretty conclusive evidence it hadn’t been opened recently.
“I’m going up and take a look anyway,” he instructed. “Stay here and hold it open for me so I can get in again!”
A short, steeply-tilted flight of iron stairs led to a duplicate of the first hatchway, and there was a decrepit bulb lighting the space between the two. He went back to the latter, and took the precaution of giving it a couple of turns to the left; it expired and made him less of a target from the roof outside when he’d forced open the second door.
It was just as well he had. The squeaking and grating of the second door boomed out all over the roof, with the tall surrounding buildings to help it along acoustically. Instantly a handful of angry bees, steel jacketed, seemed to swarm at it as he swung it cautiously out, and it clicked and popped in a half-dozen places at once. But the flashes of yellow and the bangs that accompanied them came not from the roof itself but from the various windows overlooking it. The reception committee was greeting the wrong guy, that was all.
“That would’ve been one for the record, if—” he thought grimly. Still, it wouldn’t have been their fault any more than his. He’d flattened himself on the steps like a caterpillar, chin resting on the top one, while he held the door on a crack with one hand. Threadlike as the slit was, something whistled and plopped into the plaster behind him instead of hitting the side of the door. “That’s Ober, showing off how good he is!” he scowled resentfully. “He oughta be in a sideshow with those eyes of his!”
The thought of what would have happened if it had been Harriman, with Betty in front of him, wasn’t a pretty one. But it was a pushover Harriman hadn’t come up here, or if he had, had doubled back again in a hurry, like at the downstairs door. Otherwise he’d be lying stretched out on the tar out there right now, and they wouldn’t be wasting time trying to riddle still another.
He was reaching behind him with his free hand, trying to get his handkerchief out of his back pocket and flap it at them in some way, when a voice boomed out: “Hold it, men, for God’s sake! He’s got a girl with him—” They’d just sent word up, and that would have been a big consolation to Betty, turned into a human lead pencil.
Merrill straightened up, gave the door a kick outward with his foot, and bellowed forth: “It’s Merrill, you bunch of clodhoppers! Why don’t’cha use a little self-control!” A figure poised on one of the window sills and jumped down to the theater roof below with a sound like a bass drum. But Merrill had already turned and gone skittering down the stairs again, to where the usher was calling up to him: “Hey, you! Quick, you up there—”
He missed the last few steps entirely, but there was no room to fall in — just landed smotheringly on the uniformed figure below him. The show must have “broken” in those few minutes while he was up on the roof. The blaze of light coming through from the auditorium inside told him that, and the peaceful humming and shuffling from belowstairs as the audience filtered out and dispersed, all unaware of what had been going on in their midst. It was just a “neighborhood” show house, it hadn’t been a big crowd, and the balcony was already empty and still. But the usher, as they both picked themselves up, was pointing a trembling hand out into the gallery.
Merrill took in three things at once: the motion picture operator lying flat on his back groaning, as though he’d just been thrown down bodily out of the projection room; the projection room door above, momentarily open and blazing with incandescence to reveal Harriman’s head and shoulders; and the iron ladder swinging out from the wall as it toppled and fell, pushed down by Harriman.
Merrill had the bead on him already, and it wouldn’t have taken a dead shot like Ober to plug him with all that blaze of light behind him, but Betty’s head showed just behind him and her scream came winging down. Merrill’s finger joint stayed despairingly, and the slamming tight of the door cut short her scream and effaced the single opportunity that had been given him.
He just stood there staring sickly upward at where the opening had been, as the full implication hit him. They had him now, sure — trapped, cornered at last, after one of the bloodiest chases in criminal history. But he had them too! He had Merrill, anyway. And that was just the trouble; Merrill was under orders, wasn’t alone in this.