My first impulse, of course, was to turn and race out. I fought it down. Find that earring first, I reasoned with myself. You’ve got to get it back! It was more vital to recover it than ever. It wasn’t just a case of keeping my presence here from Jimmy’s knowledge now, it was a case of keeping it from the police! What was blackmail compared to being dragged into a murder case—and all the avalanches of notoriety that would ensue?
I found myself doing something I wouldn’t have believed I had the nerve to do: bending down over him and going through all his pockets. He didn’t have it on him. He didn’t have the ten thousand cash any more either, but I didn’t care about that; it wasn’t identifiable.
I crouched there, suddenly motionless. My hand had just then accidentally, as might have been expected, fleetingly contacted his in the course of my search. The brief touch was repellent, yes, but that wasn’t what made me freeze rigid like that, stare unseeingly along the floor before me. It was this: the touch of his clammy skin was already cool, far cooler than my own. My sketchy knowledge of such matters was sufficient to tell me that meant he’d been dead some little time, at least half an hour or an hour. The point was, he’d certainly been dead by the time I’d come into the room just now.
And belatedly, like a sort of long-delayed and not at all funny mental double take, I was just remembering that I’d heard a sharp intake of breath at the moment I’d jolted back and given my own strangled little cry of discovery just now.
If he was dead, he hadn’t made the sound. And you can’t cry out, and still draw in your breath, so I hadn’t either.
It could have been a discarded shoe of Carpenter’s, dropped to the floor in there and happening to land upright. Even though it was pointing straight toward me, as if to match an unseen pair of eyes somewhere high over it, looking out through an unsuspected rent in the drape. It could have been, but then it wouldn’t have moved.
As if the direction of my eyes had power to lend it motion. It shifted stealthily back and was gone.
There was only one coherent thought in the fireworks display of panic going off inside my head: Don’t scream. Don’t move. Someone in there has been watching you ever since you came in. He may let you go, if you don’t let on you’ve spotted him. Work yourself over toward the door, and then break out fast.
I straightened up. The earring was forgotten, everything else was forgotten. I just wanted out. My feet took a surreptitious step under the cover of the gold dress. Then another. Then a third. Like in that kid’s game, where they’re not supposed to catch you moving. I was halfway over to it now. But even if the maneuvering of my feet couldn’t be detected, the position of my body in the room kept changing. That was enough to give me away.
About one more step now. I was just starting to raise my hand unnoticeably in front of me, to tear at the knob and fling myself out, when I heard a click behind me. The sort of a click that a triphammer makes when it goes back. My eyes went around in spite of myself. The drape was out of the way and a man had taken its place now. He was holding a gun at about belt-buckle level.
Even if I hadn’t met him across a gun — and across a man he’d already killed — the mere sight of him would have thrown a jolt into me. His expression was the epitome of viciousness. You didn’t have to wonder if he’d shoot, you only had to wonder when he would. His face was a mirror: it showed me my own imminent death about to take place. He hadn’t had to step out and show himself, he could have let me get away without seeing who he was. The mere fact that he had stepped out, showed I wasn’t going to be let get away alive.
You could hear his breath rasp against his imperfectly shaved upper lip, like something frictioning sandpaper. That was all you could hear in the place, that little sound. You couldn’t hear my breath at all; my heart had blown a fuse.
Suddenly he made a move and I thought for a minute the bullet had found me. But he’d only hitched his head at me, ordering me to come closer.
I couldn’t; my feet wouldn’t have done it even if I’d wanted them to. “No, don’t,” I moaned sickly.
“You’re not getting out of here to pin this on me,” he slurred. His lips parted and white showed through. But it wasn’t a grin, it was just a baring of teeth. “I want the dough he was coming into tonight, see? I got a line on that, never mind how. Now come on, where is it?”
“I have—” I panted. I couldn’t go ahead. I pointed to the still form lying between us on the floor.
Did you ever hear a hungry hyena howl against the moon? That was the inflection of his voice. “Come a-a-a-ahn, what’d you do with it?” Then his jaws snapped shut — still like a hyena’s on a hunk of food. “All right, I don’t have to ask for it. I can just reach for it!” But he didn’t mean with his fingers, he meant with a bullet. “You’ve seen me up here now. That’s your tough luck.” And he said again what he had in the beginning: “You’re not pinning this on me.”
The gun twitched warningly, getting ready to recoil against the flat hollow of his indrawn stomach, and this was my last minute.
Then instead of going bam! it went gra-a-a-ack! Like those little flat paddles on sticks that kids swing around to make noise with. And instead of coming from in front of him, it came from behind him, up on the wall of the bed-alcove somewhere. My knees dipped to let me down, and then stiffened and went on holding me up some more.
It startled the two of us alike. But I was able to recover quicker, because I knew instantly what it was, and he didn’t. It threw him for a complete loss. It was one of those sounds that are so indefinite as to cause, and yet it was so close by, so harshly menacing. It was simply that taxidriver downstairs reminding me my ten minutes were up.
He swung first to one side, then to the other, then all the way around, half-crouched, and the gun went off me completely. I pulled at the doorknob, whisked out, and went down the stairs like a gold streak.
He came out after me just as I reached the first turn. There was a window there and it was open a little both at the top and bottom, in order to ventilate the stairs and halls during the night. He shot down the stairs at me, on a descending line of fire, just as I flashed around the turn and got out of it. It didn’t hit me, but it should have hit the window and shattered it or it should have hit the plaster of the wall and ploughed into it. It didn’t hit anywhere.
Later, long afterwards, it came back to me that it must have, through some freak of downward slanting, neatly gone out through that slender inches-wide lower opening without hitting anything. I didn’t think of that then. I didn’t think of anything then except getting down the rest of those stairs and out to the street.
He didn’t fire after me a second time. He couldn’t aim at me from where he was any more. The underside of the stairs over me protected me now. His only chance of hitting me would have been to run down after me and overtake me on the same section of stairs. He still could have done that if he’d tried. Any man is quicker than any woman, particularly a woman in rhumba clogs. But he was afraid of whoever it was that he imagined to be coming up from below, and he was afraid of rousing the house.
I heard his feet go scuffling up the other way, higher still, toward the roof.
The entryway was empty when I got down to it. The hackman must have gone right back to his machine after dutifully giving me the summons I’d asked for. He’d even missed hearing the shot. I could tell that by the cheerful matter-of-factness of his opening remark when I streaked out and burrowed into the back of his machine. “Well, I sure brought you down fast, didn’t I, lady?” he asked.