Ignoring the elevator, he headed for the stairs.
CHAPTER XIII
The corridor was deserted when Johnny stepped out onto it from the fourth-floor landing. He moved rapidly to the door of 407 and tried the knob. The lock in the patched panel rattled loosely, but it held. Johnny debated trying his Duarte passkey, and decided against it. It probably wouldn't work, anyhow, and he didn't know how much time he had. He put his shoulder to the door and applied steadily increasing pressure. The lock burst with a grieving sound of overstrained metal and he stepped inside and pushed the door closed.
Inside he went directly to the large closet at the rear of the room. After opening it he found it so dark inside he groped for a light switch, then for a cord. Finding neither, he backed out and turned on the room's overhead light. This time, when he returned, he could see the glint from closely aligned bottles in a case of Armagnac at his feet. He toed the case thoughtfully. Tremaine never had come through on his promise to drop off a case at the Duarte.
When he raised his eyes, Johnny found himself looking at an attache case on the eye-level shelf. Because of its dimensions he reached for it hopefully. He shook his head in disgust as soon as he lifted it down; it didn't weigh enough.
He set it down out of the way, and swiftly went through the rest of the closet. Disappointed, he backed out and ran his eye around the rest of the room. It offered few likely looking hiding places for thirty-pound objects.
He tested the frame and the base of the sofa, fruitlessly. He was considering the bed when he heard the voices at the door. “-lock's been forced, Ernest,” a feminine voice said hollowly from outside. “What can have happened here?”
Johnny padded noiselessly back to the closet, closed the door, snatched up the attache case from the floor and fled to the bathroom, whose door he pushed three-quarters shut. He looked out to see Ernest Faulkner cautiously reconnoiter the apartment from the hallway with Gloria Philips at his shoulder. The lawyer's prim mouth pursed soundlessly at the sight of the disheveled interior.
“Look at the place!” the redhead exclaimed, less reticent. “What in the world-” She pushed past Faulkner and click-clacked rapidly in her three-inch high heels across the room beyond Johnny's range of vision. He was left in no doubt as to her whereabouts when he heard the closet door reopen. Her voice came again immediately, muffledly. “It's gone!” Almost at once she spoke again more clearly, as though she had turned to face the lawyer. “The case is gone, Ernest. Where can he have put it? He wouldn't have any reason-”
Her voice died out as Faulkner moved forward to join her. “Let me look,” he said nervously.
“I tell you it's gone,” she repeated impatiently. The tap-tap of her high heels sounded as she evidently got out of Faulkner's way. “I don't understand why-”
In the bathroom Johnny snatched a bath mat from a wall rack and swathed the attache case in it, to muffle sound. Probing with his big thumbs through the mat's thickness, he found the case locks and popped them one at a time with a barely discernible sound. From outside he could hear a flurry of movement and half-questions and quarter-answers as the man and woman searched in an obviously increasing state of anxiety.
Johnny discarded the mat and opened the case, silently. He groped around inside and felt his knuckles brush against a piece of metal. He picked it up, and stared down uncomprehendingly at a snouted, tubular piece of steel attached at a right angle to a flat metal plate. He hefted its light weight in his palm puzzledly, turned it over and looked at it from another angle. He started to return it to the case, opened that wider for a better view of its other contents and nearly dropped the whole thing at the sound of another voice outside.
“What are you two doing here?” Detective James Rogers' voice demanded crisply.
Johnny shoved everything back in the case, closed it and tucked it under his arm. Back at the door he looked out through the aperture at Ernest Faulkner's white, shaken features, peering in dismay at the sandy-haired man standing in the hallway arch.
“I-ah-have a key,” the lawyer got out in a voice that sounded better than he looked. “Not that we-I needed it. Upon our arrival we found the door had been forced.” Johnny could see him gaining confidence at the sound of his own voice. “I really-”
“I asked you what you were doing here!” the detective rapped back at him sharply. Johnny couldn't see the redhead at all. “And where's Killain?”
“Killain?” Faulkner echoed blankly.
Johnny opened the bathroom door and stepped out. Faulkner's jaw dropped ludicrously. Gloria Philips stood at the end of the sofa. There was no particular expression on her face that Johnny could decipher, but her eyes were on the attache case under his arm.
“There you are,” Rogers said drily. “I missed you downstairs. What the hell's going on here?”
“I just been catchin' up on my homework as to how Jack Arends was killed, Jimmy,” Johnny said easily.
“I know how Arends was killed. You missed the excitement downstairs by skipping off back up here. I just barely got to Tremaine in time to keep him from gunning Stitt with an automatic he'd dredged up from somewhere. The wagon and the ambulance were loading side by side.”
Johnny ignored the interruption. “If you had to kill a man so bad you couldn't wait, Jimmy, and you had two minutes alone with him in a room two closed doors away from other people in the same apartment, how would you do it?”
Detective Rogers opened his mouth, and closed it again. He looked at Ernest Faulkner, who looked baffled, and at Gloria Philips, who looked as beautiful as ever. He looked back at Johnny. “With a silencer,” he said finally. He shook his head impatiently. “If I could get it out past the other people in the apartment. And if you're still speaking of Arends, that's where you're all wet. We found the gun, and there was no sign of a silencer. And the gun was an automatic, which can't take a silencer.”
“Can't, Jimmy?”
The sandy-haired man gestured irritably. “You know what I mean. Stop being difficult. Instead of fitting on the barrel as a silencer does on a revolver, because of the barrel's action on an automatic the silencer would have to go on the slide. It would be a tricky damn job, one for a craftsman. I've never seen one.”
Johnny removed the attache case from under his arm, opened it, picked up the snouted piece of metalware and tossed it to the detective. “So now you have, Jimmy.”
The sandy-haired man turned it over and over in his hands. He reached in a jacket pocket, removed Stitt's blued-steel Mauser, looked at it questioningly and shoved it back. From the opposite pocket he removed a black automatic — Tremaine's, Johnny realized-and looked at it searchingly. “Let's see,” Roger murmured, half aloud. “I come into the room-” He ran through it in his mind. He turned back to Johnny with a negative shake of his head. “Still no good. You're forgetting there was no silencer on the automatic beside Arends.”
“Get yourself in gear, Jimmy. There wasn't supposed to be. You come into the room with a silenced automatic ready to go. You pop the guy. If you've come ready with another slide, how long does it take you to break down the automatic, remove the slide with the silencer and shove in the plain one? Stick the silencer in the attache case in which you lugged the whole works in there an' put it back under your arm, drop the automatic on the floor beside the body an' holler murder?”
Jimmy Rogers' hazel eyes were slits. “Let's find out,” he said grimly. He walked to a small table and pushed aside the lamp on it. He placed Jules Tremaine's automatic and the wicked-looking silencer attached to its slide down together, slipped out of his jacket, rubbed his hands together and looked around at Johnny. “Okay. This won't work perfectly unless this is an identical gun, but it looks close. Anyway, it'll give me an idea. This is the reverse, now- silencer onto automatic, instead of off. You time me. Say when.”