“Well?” he queried.
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “You aren’t going to pull a dirty trick like that! You don’t expect me to take a hand in such a stinking, rotten setup.”
“Oh yes I do,” smiled the Professor. “And you will.”
“Count me out.” I stood up.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m phoning Caldwell right now. I’m telling him to have the police there when Jake contacts him. Evidence of blackmail.”
The Professor was still smiling. “You might also ask them to send a squad around here, then,” he suggested. “For evidence of murder. Don’t forget Mike Drayton, my friend.”
It should have stopped me, but it didn’t. I kept moving for the phone. “All right, Professor,” I said. “I’ll do just that. I’m beginning to think I deserve a rap for all the dirty things I’ve done lately. And it will be worth it if I can save Caldwell.”
He was still smiling. “What about saving Ellen?” he murmured.
That did stop me. “Ellen? What’s she got to do with all this?”
“Nothing—yet. And she needn’t have, if you agree to be sensible. But remember what I told you the other evening. We could use Ellen Post nicely, in order to get to Leland Post and some big money. For your sake, I agreed to abandon the notion.
“If you promise to cooperate with Caldwell, I’ll keep my bargain. No frame-up for Ellen Post. But if you don’t, I’ll see to it that she’s the next victim. And you know me well enough to realize I don’t bluff or make idle threats. Go to that telephone now and Ellen Post will pay for it.”
All the while he was smiling, smiling because he knew he’d win. He was crazy, he was the Devil, but he was no fool.
I walked over to the sofa and sat down. I put my head in my hands, but there was nowhere to hide.
“That’s better,” the Professor told me. “Now, tomorrow morning, you can probably expect a visit from Caldwell. Here’s how you handle him—”
He told me, and I sat there waiting to obey. Then he went away and I continued to sit there, waiting for morning to come.
The next morning I sat in my office and waited for Caldwell to come. And I handled him.
“My God, Roberts, say something!”
Caldwell shook my shoulder. Maybe he just put his hand on me, but he was trembling so that he shook anything he touched.
“Don’t you understand?” he panted. “This woman—she came back. She wants fifty thousand. She says she’ll go to Marge... And this man has those pictures, he’s in with her—”
I shrugged his hand off. “I can’t help you. If you’d only taken my advice and broken with her the very day I suggested it, this couldn’t have happened.”
“I know, I was a fool, a damned fool! But it has happened, and something must be done.” He gulped. “Couldn’t you see her again, talk her out of it?”
“Please, Ed. Obviously she’s determined. And I can’t afford to get mixed up in anything like this. You understand my position.”
“But can’t we fix up a trap or something, with the police?”
“Then they’d see the pictures, wouldn’t they? And Marge would hear the whole story.”
“God, what can I do? What can I do?”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to pay her off.”
Silence.
“Look, Roberts, you’re sure there is no other way? I’d make it worth your while.”
“It’s too late now.”
“Well, will you come with me tonight when I meet her and that man?”
I gave him a refrigerated smile. “That would be very unwise. And I’m afraid, until this matter clears up, that we had better not see one another.”
“But who can I go to now? Who else is there to help me?”
He waited, but I didn’t answer. I couldn’t answer. There was no answer left for him. I could only sit there and watch him cry, watch his jelly-flesh dissolve in his clothes, watch the red hands as they scrabbled and twisted across my desk, endlessly ravelling and unravelling a piece of dirty string. A string saver.
He got up, finally, and shuffled out. I sat there and kept thinking about that piece of string. Suddenly I knew what was going to happen to Edgar Clinton Caldwell. Tonight he’d pay the fifty thousand. Then, in a few weeks, they’d put the bite on him for another fifty, with the duplicate negatives. And sometime later, they’d be around again for the last fifty. Maybe they’d want him to sell his house, too.
Somewhere along the line he’d crack. He’d crack and look to a bigger piece of string to save him. Caldwell would end up by hanging himself. I knew it as surely as I knew I was sitting there. He’d follow the unconscious pattern to the end. Once a string saver, always a string saver.
And it was my responsibility. Oh, he’d be no great loss to the world. He’d done his share of despicable things, and his behavior with Eve England wasn’t pretty. He deserved some punishment.
But I had no right to do the punishing. Or to execute him. He saved the string, but I’d tie the hangman’s knot. I’d place the noose around his neck; I’d kick the chair away and leave him dangling there, gray jelly quivering on the end of a rope, gray jelly jerking and then the rope cutting into his chin, cutting into his neck and stretching it long and thin. They say, sometimes, when they cut down a corpse, the neck is no bigger around than a child’s wrist—
Still, it was the lady or the tiger. Ellen or Caldwell. One of them had to go, because the Professor said so. I’d kept my bargain, and now I could go and claim my reward. I could go to Malibu this afternoon.
I walked out of my office and down the hall. As I passed Rogers’ little cubicle in back, I suddenly remembered the lecture for this week. He’d be finishing it up, now, and I could take it along for study.
Rogers had his door open. I went in quietly, not wanting to disturb his work. He sat hunched over his desk, going through some papers: pictures and clippings from newspaper files.
I caught a glimpse of a leonine head and a caption:
LELAND POST WINS STATE SENATE RACE
That stopped me.
Rogers looked up. “Oh, it’s you,” he said, scrabbling his clippings together in a heap. “How’d you make out with the sucker?”
“He took it all right. He’ll sail for the fifty G’s, I think.”
“Good.”
I sat down on the desk, casually, and tried to keep my voice from trembling. “Thought you had my speech. But I see you’re working on something else.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Didn’t the Professor tell you yet? We’re rigging up a frame for this politician, Leland Post. He’s the key to some important dough. You’ll be in on it, of course—guess you know his niece. Well, she’s the key.”
“So.” I stood up and clenched my hands behind my back, to keep from strangling him. “What’s the setup?”
“That’s what I’m doping out now. The Professor’ll tell you himself, I suppose.”
“I suppose.”
I walked out of the room, somehow, under my own power. I made it through the hall, taking each step slowly. With every step I took, I called myself a new name.
What a fool I’d been to trust the Professor! Of course he wouldn’t keep his bargain, he had no intention of keeping it. He was out after money and power, and he’d get everything he could. Nothing would stop him. Even while he was playing with me, he’d already set the wheels in motion to take care of Ellen and her uncle.
And now that I knew, what could I do about it? For the moment, nothing. I’d just have to wait and see how he’d approach me, what he’d say, what the scheme was. Then perhaps I might find a way out. But I doubted it. The Professor never left any holes—with him, there was no way out. Except the way Mike Drayton took, the way Edgar Caldwell would take soon.