She greeted him with a little whimper of relief.
He sized her up. “Ah, poor kid.” he said throatily, shoving out the chair next to her and sitting down on it sidewise. “Bad as all that, huh?”
“This is nothing; you should have seen me five or ten minutes ago.” Then she brushed that aside, leaned over toward him absorbedly. “Burgess, it was worth it! He saw her! Not only that. Somebody came around afterward and bribed him. Some man, acting on her behalf, I suppose. You can get all that out of him, can’t you?”
“Come on,” he said briskly. “If I don’t it won’t be for lack of trying. I’m going up there right now. I’ll put you in a taxi first and—”
“No, no, I want to go back with you. It’s all right now, I’m over it.”
The delicatessen couple came out to the doorway after them, watched them go down the street together in the paling dawn. There was a dark disapproval of Burgess plainly to be read on both their faces.
“Yah, fine brudder she’s got!” the man snorted contemptuously. “First leaffs her out alone at fife in the morning! Now he comes when it’s too late to make trouble with the fellow what done it! A loafer he iss if he can’t look after her any better than that!”
Burgess moved stealthily up the stairs, well ahead of her, motioning her backhand to go easy. By the time she’d caught up to him he’d already been listening intently at the door for several moments, head bent over motionless against it.
“Sounds as if he’s lammed out,” he whispered. “Can’t hear him. Get back a little, don’t stand too close, in case he starts up with something.”
She retreated a few steps lower down on the staircase, until only her head and shoulders were above floor level. She saw him take something to the door and work it carefully, with little sound if any. Suddenly a gap showed, he thrust his hand back to his hip, held it there, and trod guardedly forward.
She came on up in his wake, holding her breath for the flare-up of violence, even the ambushed onslaught, that she expected from one moment to the next. She was even with the threshold herself when the sudden flare of electric light through the opening made her jump spasmodically, though it was soundless. He’d lit the place up.
She peered through, in time to see him disappear into that doorway in the adjoining wall that she had by-passed herself in her mad circuit of the room a while ago. She ventured in past the door sill, emboldened, for his uninterrupted transit showed this first room to be vacant.
There was a second soundless flare of electricity, and the dark place he’d gone into became a gleaming white-surfaced bathroom. She was in a straight line with it and him; for a moment she could see into it. She could see an old-fashioned four-legged tub. She could see the rump of a figure folded like a clothespin over the rim of it. The soles of its shoes were turned back and up, she could see them too. The tub could not have been marble, in such a place, and yet it gave a curious optical illusion of being marbled even on the outside. That might have been due to the thin red vein or two discernible down its outside surface. Red-veined marble—
For a moment she thought he’d gotten sick and passed out. Then as she moved to go in after him, Burgess’s sharp “Don’t come in here, Carol; stay where you are!” stopped her like the crack of a whip. He came back a step or two, gave the door a corrective push-to, narrowing it enough to keep her from looking in any more, without closing it entirely.
He stayed in there a long time. She remained where she was, waiting. She noticed her own wrist was shaking a little, but it wasn’t due to fear any more, it was with a sort of emotional tension. She knew what that was in there, now. She knew what must have brought it about. A paroxysm of drug-magnified fear, insupportable once she’d made good her escape and the unseen tentacles of retribution seemed to be closing in on him. All the more dreadful because they were unidentifiable.
A scrap of torn paper lying there on the table that caught her eye confirmed it. Three almost illegible words, trailing off into a meaningless wavy line that overran the paper and ended in a pencil stub lying on the floor. Ther after me—
The door widened grudgingly and Burgess came out to her again at last. His face looked whiter than before he’d gone in there, she thought. She noticed that he crowded her before him, without overtly seeming to, so that she found herself moving backward toward the outer door without any volition of her own. “Did you see that?” she asked, about the note.
“Yeah, on the way in.”
“Is he—?”
For answer he poked a finger up under one ear, then swept it all the way around his neck to the other.
She drew in her breath sharply.
“Come on, get out of here,” he said with kindly meant gruffness. “This is no place for you.” He was closing the outside door after the two of them, the way he’d found it just now. “That tub,” she heard him murmur under his breath, as he guided her down the stairs to the fore of him with both hands to her shrinking shoulders. “I’ll never be able to think of the Red Sea again without—” He realized that she was listening to him, and shut up.
He put her in a taxi around the corner. “This’ll get you home. I’ve got to get right back and break out with the notification.”
“It’s no good now, is it?” she said almost tearfully, leaning toward him through the cab window.
“No, it’s no good now, Carol.”
“Couldn’t I repeat what he told me—?”
“That would be just hearsay. You heard somebody say he’d seen her, been bribed to deny it. Second-hand evidence. It’s no good that way; they won’t accept it.”
He’d taken a thickly folded handkerchief out of his pocket, opened it in the palm of his hand. She saw him looking at something resting within it.
“What’s that?” she said.
“You tell me what it is.”
“A razor blade.”
“Not enough.”
“A... a safety razor blade?”
“That’s it. And when a man takes a swing at his throat with one of the old-fashioned open kind — such as I found lying under him at the bottom of the tub — what’s one of these doing overlooked under the shelf-paper in the cabinet? A guy uses either one type or the other, not both.” He put it away again. “Suicide, they’ll say. And I think I’ll let them — for the present. You go home, Carol. Whichever it is, you weren’t here tonight, you’re staying out of it. I’ll see to that.”
In the taxi, riding homeward through streets tin-plated in the quickening dawn, she let her head hang futilely downward.
Not tonight, darling, not tonight after all. But maybe tomorrow night, maybe the night after.
15
The Ninth Day Before the Execution
Lombard
It was one of those incredible luxury hotels, its single slender tower rising to disdainful heights above the mass of more commonplace buildings like a tilted aristocratic nose. It was a plush and jeweled perch on which birds of paradise flying east from the movie colony were wont to alight. Bedraggled birds of equally rich plumage, flying west before the storm broke, had also sought refuge here in droves while they were still able to make it.
This, he knew, was going to require a finesse all its own. It needed just the right touch, just the right approach. He didn’t make the tactical mistake of trying to gain admission on demand, sight unseen. It wasn’t the kind of place in which anyone was ever received by anyone just at request or at first try. You had to campaign, pull wires.
He sought out the flower shop first, therefore, entering it from the lobby itself through a curved door of blue glass. He said, “What would you say are Miss Mendoza’s favorite flowers? I understand you deliver a great many to her.”