I sent him two bullets. Pat sent him two.
The negro teetered over the rail.
He came down on us, arms out-flung — a dead man’s swan-dive.
We scurried down the stairs from under him.
He shook the house when he landed, but we weren’t watching him then.
The smooth sleek head of Raymond Elwood took our attention.
In the light from above, it showed for a furtive split-second around the newel-post at the foot of the stairs. Showed and vanished.
Pat Reddy, closer to the rail than I, went over it in a one-hand vault down into the blackness below.
I made the foot of the stairs in two jumps, jerked myself around with a hand on the newel, and plunged into the suddenly noisy dark of the hall.
A wall I couldn’t see hit me. Caroming off the opposite wall, I spun into a room whose curtained grayness was the light of day after the hall.
IX
Pat Reddy stood with one hand on a chair-back, holding his belly with the other. His face was mouse-colored under its blood. His eyes were glass agonies. He had the look of a man who had been kicked.
The grin he tried failed. He nodded toward the rear of the house. I went back.
In a little passageway I found Raymond Elwood.
He was sobbing and pulling frantically at a locked door. His face was the hard white of utter terror.
I measured the distance between us.
He turned as I jumped.
I put everything I had in the downswing of my gun-barrel—
A ton of meat and bone crashed into my back.
I went over against the wall, breathless, giddy, sick.
Red-silk arms that ended in brown hands locked around me.
I wondered if there was a whole regiment of these gaudy negroes — or if I was colliding with the same one over and over.
This one didn’t let me do much thinking.
He was big. He was strong. He didn’t mean any good.
My gun-arm was flat at my side, straight down. I tried a shot at one of the negro’s feet. Missed. Tried again. He moved his feet. I wriggled around, half facing him.
Elwood piled on my other side.
The negro bent me backward, folding my spine on itself like an accordion.
I fought to hold my knees stiff. Too much weight was hanging on me. My knees sagged. My body curved back.
Pat Reddy, swaying in the doorway, shone over the negro’s shoulder like the Angel Gabriel.
Gray pain was in Pat’s face, but his eyes were clear. His right hand held a gun. His left was getting a blackjack out of his hip pocket.
He swung the sap down on the negro’s shaven skull.
The black man wheeled away from me, shaking his head.
Pat hit him once more before the negro closed with him — hit him full in the face, but couldn’t beat him off.
Twisting my freed gun-hand up, I drilled Elwood neatly through the chest, and let him slide down me to the floor.
The negro had Pat against the wall, bothering him a lot. His broad red back was a target.
But I had used five of the six bullets in my gun. I had more in my pocket, but reloading takes time.
I stepped out of Elwood’s feeble hands, and went to work with the flat of my gun on the negro. There was a roll of fat where his skull and neck fit together. The third time I hit it, he flopped, taking Pat with him.
I rolled him off. The blond police detective — not very blond now — got up.
At the other end of the passageway, an open door showed an empty kitchen.
Pat and I went to the door that Elwood had been playing with. It was a solid piece of carpentering, and neatly fastened.
Yoking ourselves together, we began to beat the door with our combined three hundred and seventy or eighty pounds.
It shook, but held. We hit it again. Wood we couldn’t see tore.
Again.
The door popped away from us. We went through — down a flight of steps — rolling, snowballing down — until a cement floor stopped us.
Pat came back to life first.
“You’re a hell of an acrobat,” he said. “Get off my neck!”
I stood up. He stood up. We seemed to be dividing the evening between falling on the floor and getting up from the floor.
A light-switch was at my shoulder. I turned it on.
If I looked anything like Pat, we were a fine pair of nightmares. He was all raw meat and dirt, with not enough clothes left to hide much of either.
I didn’t like his looks, so I looked around the basement in which we stood. To the rear was a furnace, coal-bins and a woodpile. To the front was a hallway and rooms, after the manner of the upstairs.
The first door we tried was locked, but not strongly. We smashed through it into a photographer’s dark-room.
The second door was unlocked, and put us in a chemical laboratory: retorts, tubes, burners and a small still. There was a little round iron stove in the middle of the room. No one was there.
We went out into the hallway and to the third door, not so cheerfully. This cellar looked like a bloomer. We were wasting our time here, when we should have stayed upstairs. I tried the door.
It was firm beyond trembling.
We smacked it with our weight, together, experimentally. It didn’t shake.
“Wait.”
Pat went to the woodpile in the rear and came back with an axe.
He swung the axe against the door, flaking out a hunk of wood. Silvery points of light sparkled in the hole. The other side of the door was an iron or steel plate.
Pat put the axe down and leaned on the helve.
“You write the next prescription,” he said.
I didn’t have anything to suggest, except:
“I’ll camp here. You beat it upstairs, and see if any of your coppers have shown up. This is a God-forsaken hole, but somebody may have sent in an alarm. See if you can find another way into this room — a window, maybe — or man-power enough to get us in through this door.”
Pat turned toward the steps.
A sound stopped him — the clicking of bolts on the other side of the iron-lined door.
A jump put Pat on one side of the frame. A step put me on the other.
Slowly the door moved in. Too slowly.
I kicked it open.
Pat and I went into the room on top of my kick.
His shoulder hit the woman. I managed to catch her before she fell.
Pat took her gun. I steadied her back on her feet.
Her face was a pale blank square.
She was Myra Banbrock, but she now had none of the masculinity that had been in her photographs and description.
Steadying her with one arm — which also served to block her arms — I looked around the room.
A small cube of a room whose walls were brown-painted metal. On the floor lay a queer little dead man.
A little man in tight-fitting black velvet and silk. Black velvet blouse and breeches, black silk stockings and skull cap, black patent leather pumps. His face was small and old and bony, but smooth as stone, without line or wrinkle.
A hole was in his blouse, where it fit high under his chin. The hole bled very slowly. The floor around him showed it had been bleeding faster a little while ago.
Beyond him, a safe was open. Papers were on the floor in front of it, as if the safe had been tilted to spill them out.
The girl moved against my arm.
“You killed him?” I asked.
“Yes,” too faint to have been heard a yard away.
“Why?”
She shook her short brown hair out of her eyes with a tired jerk of her head.
“Does it make any difference?” she asked. “I did kill him.”
“It might make a difference,” I told her, taking my arm away, and going over to shut the door. People talk more freely in a room with a closed door. “I happen to be in your father’s employ. Mr. Reddy is a police detective. Of course, neither of us can smash any laws, but if you’ll tell us what’s what, maybe we can help you.”