“Please, Tony. Please, please...”
Then she lay quietly on the floor, and I turned and walked out onto the veranda. I leaned against the railing, looking off into the timber where night had come, and from one of the trees came the crying of a crazy-voiced loon. I put the barrel of the gun into my mouth until the sharp sight was digging into the roof, and even then, when there was no reasonable alternative, I was a little surprised to realize I was actually going to do it.
I’ll Kill for You
Originally published in Giant Manhunt #2 (1953).
She got out of the yellow cab in front of the apartment building and stood for a few seconds at the curb as she searched her purse for the fare. I stood at the corner beside a public trash can and watched her until she had paid the cabby and crossed the sidewalk. Her spike heels rapped out a brisk tattoo on concrete. The pneumatic catch on the apartment door gave a sharp gasp, trailing off into a long, expiring sigh.
I waited until the cab had whisked its red tail light around the far corner, then I went down to the entrance and in after her. Behind me, the door gasped and sighed again. It was a sad sound. A lost and damned sound. It was like a last whimper of regret at the doorway to hell.
Inside, the lobby was empty. From the elevator well came the soft, pervasive whine of the ascending car. I went across the lobby quickly and stood watching the arrow of the floor indicator move around to six. It stopped there, not quite half way around the circumference of the dial, and above me, echoing with hollow faintness down the deep shaft, was the distant sound of doors opening and closing.
Turning away, walking fast, I started up the stairs, taking them two at a time, but not running. The stairs were wide, about eight feet, for the first two flights. Above that, they narrowed to four and continued upward in an economy of light. On each landing, where the angle of ascension turned back on itself, there was a single red bulb. When I passed under the bulbs, my abbreviated shadow leaped ahead of me with startling suddenness, dying in shadow as abruptly.
I paced myself, two steps to a stride, until I came up off the stairs into the sixth floor hall. I stood there at the head of the flight, one hand on the steel post of the railing, and listened to the echo of my heart in my brain. It was a kind of accelerated tom-tom beat that was not arhythmic but was much too fast. I waited until the cadence subsided, and then I walked down the hall to a door that bore on its bleached surface the arabic identification six-o-three in chaste chrome.
The knob of the door turned under the pressure of my fingers, releasing the catch without sound, and I stood motionless for maybe three minutes, palming the knob and listening. There was no sound within the room. Cracking the door enough for passage, I slipped through into a small vestibule and pushed the door shut behind me. The catch slipped into position with the tiniest of oiled clicks. Moving swiftly, I took three long strides to the entrance to the living room and looked in.
She was standing almost in the middle of the room, just at the end of the sofa, with her back to me. Even from a distance, I could see that her muscles were as still as wood, that her flesh, to the touch, would be as cold as ice. She stood with her head bent forward and her eyes focused on the floor beyond the sofa, the light gleaming on the pale, silken cascade of her hair.
I stirred, made a sound, and she whipped around with a shrill intake of breath that tore at her constricted throat and must have hurt like the hacking of a dull blade. Her eyes flared in her drawn face, and scarlet lips that were all paint and no blood opened on the shape of a projected scream. But the scream never materialized. Closing in on her, I slashed my open hand across her cheek with a flat smack. She swayed, choking on the scream with a little animal whimper, but her feet didn’t move on the carpet. The marks of four fingers were livid on her flesh.
“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t scream.”
She stared at me with her eyes wide and dry and hot and the marks of my fingers like a brand on her face. She didn’t speak or make another sound until her breasts rose finally on a deep, ragged breath that held them for a long moment high and tight against the thin stuff of her dress. They descended on a long, controlled exhalation. I knew then that there was no more danger of hysteria, and I moved around her and beyond the sofa and stood looking down at the body on the carpet.
He lay sprawled on his face with one arm stretched out beyond his head with the fingers clawed, as if in the last instant he had been clutching for the light that had escaped his brain through a matted mass of hair and blood and bone and soft gray matter. Beyond the reaching fingers, lying on its side in the thick pile of the carpet, was a highball glass. A wet stain spread out from the lip of the glass, and in the stain there were still two tiny fragments of melting ice cubes.
“A good, thorough job,” I said, hearing behind me the soft hiss of her breath as the brutal remark slugged home.
Turning back to her, I saw that blood had returned to modify the livid smear of paint on her lips. Feverish stains were spread under the taut skin over the high bones of her cheeks.
“Why?” I said.
“Why?” She repeated the word on a suction, giving it shrill, rising inflection.
I gestured downward at the sprawled body. “Why did you kill him?”
“Kill him? Me?” Comprehension seemed to filter into her mind slowly, in a slow seepage, as water soaks through the pores of old brick.
I shrugged angrily, and my voice sounded loud, needlessly harsh, in my own ears. “Look, honey. He’s dead. He’s lying there with the back of his head blown off. I come in and find you standing over him, and his bourbon not even dry on the floor where he spilled it. What the hell am I supposed to think?”
“I didn’t kill him. I loved him. I would never have killed him.”
“Loving and killing aren’t incompatible. Sometimes, under the right circumstances, killing is a natural development. It’s happened more times than you or I could count.” Her hot eyes seemed to cloud with confusion, as if her mind were groping dumbly for a convincer, and then they cleared suddenly, acquiring a glittering intentness.
“Where’s the gun?”
The question was like a short jab to the solar plexus. I stood very still, not breathing, watching in her face the slow signs of returning assurance. After a few seconds, I dropped to my knees and looked under the sofa. Getting up, I prowled the room, looking in all the places a gun might have been dropped or thrown or placed. When I’d worked back to her, she hadn’t moved. Her eyes, still hot and dry, had completely lost their dilation, shining now with that bright intentness. Her lips were parted, fluttering very slightly with the passage of long, deep breaths. The tip of her pink tongue flicked out and around them. Reaching out, I separated her stiff fingers from the suede purse they were clutching. I rummaged for a minute and gave it back.
“Okay,” I said. “No gun. The killer must have taken it away.”
She said abruptly, “What are you doing here?” Her voice broke.
I shrugged, looking into her dry, fever-infested eyes. “What’s the difference? It makes no difference now.”
“Maybe not. Unless you’ve been here before.”
I laughed harshly. “To kill him, you mean? So then I come right back and show myself. Don’t be a fool, honey.”
Her head jerked around under a sudden strong compulsion, and her eyes dropped again to the husk on the door. She may have experienced, in that instant, an intense sensory recollection of the look and smell and feel of him in the neural rand glandular riot of the passion they had shared. However it was, when she turned back to me her eyes had lost their bright wariness and were filled instead with an incredible, flaring anguish.