I saw those three dead men falling out of the closet in room 906!
My gun was inside the waist-band of my trousers, where I could get it quickly, but his was in his hand. So I was careful to keep my own hands motionless on the edge of the table, while I widened my grin.
His eyes were changing now, and the more I looked at them the less I liked them. The gray in them had darkened and grown duller, and the pupils were larger, and white crescents were showing beneath the gray. Twice before I had looked into eyes such as these — and I hadn’t forgotten what they meant — the eyes of the congenital killer!
“Suppose you speak your piece,” I suggested after a while.
But he wasn’t to be beguiled into conversation. He shook his head a mere fraction of an inch and the corners of his compressed mouth dropped down a trifle. The white crescents of eyeballs were growing broader, pushing the gray circles up under the upper lids.
It was coming! And there was no use waiting for it!
I drove a foot at his shins under the table, and at the same time pushed the table into his lap and threw myself across it. The bullet from his gun went off to one side. Another bullet — not from his gun — thudded into the table that was upended between us.
I had him by the shoulders when the second shot from behind took him in the left arm, just below my hand. I let go then and fell away, rolling over against the wall and twisting around to face the direction from which the bullets were coming.
I twisted around just in time to see — jerking out of sight behind a corner of the passage that gave to a small dining-room — Guy Cudner’s scarred face. And as it disappeared a bullet from Orrett’s gun splattered the plaster from the wall where it had been.
I grinned at the thought of what must be going on in Orrett’s head as he lay sprawled out on the floor confronted by two Cudners. But he took a shot at me just then and I stopped grinning. Luckily, he had to twist around to fire at me, putting his weight on his wounded arm, and the pain made him wince, spoiling his aim.
Before he had adjusted himself more comfortably I had scrambled on hands and knees to Pigatti’s kitchen door — only a few feet away — and had myself safely tucked out of range around an angle in the wall; all but my eyes and the top of my head, which I risked so that I might see what went on.
Orrett was now ten or twelve feet from me, lying flat on the floor, facing Cudner, with a gun in his hand and another on the floor beside him.
Across the room, perhaps thirty feet away, Cudner was showing himself around his protecting corner at brief intervals to exchange shots with the man on the floor, occasionally sending one my way. We had the place to ourselves. There were four exits, and the rest of Pigatti’s customers had used them all.
I had my gun out, but I was playing a waiting game. Cudner, I figured, had been tipped off to Orrett’s search for him and had arrived on the scene with no mistaken idea of the other’s attitude. Just what there was between them and what bearing it had on the Montgomery murders was a mystery to me, but I didn’t try to solve it now.
They were firing in unison. Cudner would show around his corner, both men’s weapons would spit, and he would duck out of sight again. Orrett was bleeding about the head now and one of his legs sprawled crookedly behind him. I couldn’t determine whether Cudner had been hit or not.
Each had fired eight, or perhaps nine, shots when Cudner suddenly jumped out into full view, pumping the gun in his left hand as fast as its mechanism would go, the gun in his right hand hanging at his side. Orrett had changed guns, and was on his knees now, his fresh weapon keeping pace with his enemy’s.
That couldn’t last!
Cudner dropped his left-hand gun, and, as he raised the other, he sagged forward and went down on one knee. Orrett stopped firing abruptly and fell over on his back — spread out full-length. Cudner fired once more — wildly, into the ceiling — and pitched down on his face.
I sprang to Orrett’s side and kicked, both of his guns away. He was lying still but his eyes were open.
“Are you Cudner, or was he?”
“He.”
“Good!” he said, and closed his eyes.
I crossed to where Cudner lay and turned him over on his back. His chest was literally shot to pieces.
His thick lips worked, and I put my ear down to them. “I get him?”
“Yes,” I lied, “he’s already cold.”
His dying face twisted into a grin.
“Sorry...three in hotel...” he gasped hoarsely. “Mistake... wrong room... got one... had to... other two... protect myself... I...” He shuddered and died.
A week later the hospital people let me talk to Orrett. I told him what Cudner had said before he died.
“That’s the way I doped it out,” Orrett said from out of the depths of the bandages in which he was swathed. “That’s why I moved and changed my name the next day.
“I suppose you’ve got it nearly figured out by now,” he said after a while.
“No,” I confessed, “I haven’t. I’ve an idea what it was all about but I could stand having a few details cleared up.”
“I’m sorry I can’t clear them up for you, but I’ve got to cover myself up. I’ll tell you a story, though, and it may help you. Once upon a time there was a high-class crook — what the newspapers call a master-mind. Came a day when he found he had accumulated enough money to give up the game and settle down as an honest man.
“But he had two lieutenants — one in New York and one in San Francisco — and they were the only men in the world who knew he was a crook. And, besides that, he was afraid of both of them. So he thought he’d rest easier if they were out of the way. And it happened that neither of these lieutenants had ever seen the other.
“So this master-mind convinced each of them that the other was double-crossing him and would have to be bumped off for the safety of all concerned. And both of them fell for it. The New Yorker went to San Francisco to get the other, and the San Franciscan was told that the New Yorker would arrive on such-and-such a day and would stay at such-and-such a hotel.
“The master-mind figured that there was an even chance of both men passing out when they met — and he was nearly right at that. But he was sure that one would die, and then, even if the other missed hanging, there would only be one man left for him to dispose of later.”
There weren’t as many details in the story as I would have liked to have, but it explained a lot.
“How do you figure out Cudner’s getting the wrong room?” I asked.
“That was funny! Maybe it happened like this: My room was 609 and the killing was done in 906. Suppose Cudner went to the hotel on the day he knew I was due and took a quick slant at the register. He wouldn’t want to be seen looking at it if he could avoid it, so he didn’t turn it around, but flashed a look at it as it lay — facing the desk.
“When you read numbers of three figures upside-down you have to transpose them in your head to get them straight. Like 123. You’d get that 321, and then turn them around in your head. That’s what Cudner did with mine. He was keyed up, of course, thinking of the job ahead of him, and he overlooked the fact that 609 upside-down still reads 609 just the same. So he turned it around and made it 906 — Develyn’s room.”
“That’s how I doped it,” I said, “and I reckon it’s about right. And then he looked at the key-rack and saw that 906 wasn’t there. So he thought he might just as well get his job done right then, when he could roam the hotel corridors without attracting attention. Of course, he may have gone up to the room before Ansley and Develyn came in and waited for them, but I doubt it.