Then could his assailant have jumped the fence into the yard next door? He returned to the back lot. Beyond the fence lay a cul-de-sac, with exits only through the house facing on Perdue Street or over a feeble trellis into a yard beyond. Possible, yes. But highly unlikely.
Then where?
Mervyn went back to his apartment. No one seemed to have heard the shot.
He examined the bullet hole in the doorjamb. The bullet was completely buried in the redwood. He tried to estimate the angle of entry by eye. It did seem to lead back to the hedge.
He was still puzzling over the mystery of his would-be assassin’s inexplicable disappearance when he dug the slug out of the jamb. It was small, probably from a .22 hand gun... Standing there beside the splintered hole, turning the little slug over in his fingers, Mervyn suddenly became conscious of his vulnerability. It was beyond belief, but someone had tried to shoot him dead!
He hurried into his apartment, locked the door, switched off his lights and stood by the court window in the dark, sweating.
He realized now that he had never really believed the anonymous notes. Words on paper — how could they hurt you? No matter what they said.
But that bullet whizzing by his head... this slug... It became slippery in his hand.
Whoever it was had apparently waited in the deepening dusk by the hedge for his return. Waited with a gun.
And yet it all looked so peaceful out there. Homey, sort of. The lights from Harriet Brill’s and Susie Hazelwood’s apartments shone cheerfully, made even more reassuring by the fact that Mrs. Kelly’s windows and the windows of all the apartments on the lower deck were dark. And on his own side John Boce’s windows were spilling light onto the court.
Mervyn stood there in the dark, his own darkness, feeling a great aching need to reach out and touch the glow from Susie’s windows. And suddenly the darkness was insupportable. And he was very hungry.
He pulled the drapes tightly across the windows before he turned on the lights.
Then he cooked himself some bacon and eggs, tried to read a book on daily life in the twelfth century, jerked out of a doze with the merest memory of a terrifying dream, and hastily undressed and stumbled into bed.
Mervyn opened his eyes to a brilliant morning, with the purest of washed blue skies. The air coming through his bedroom windows was heavily fragrant with the odor of mown grass and freshly watered geranium leaves.
For a moment, half asleep still, he felt wonderful. But then it all came back, and his spirits plummeted. He crawled out of bed like an old man and stood under the shower for fifteen minutes to restore his youth. Afterward, he drank three cups of black coffee.
What to do?
He bethought himself of the morning newspaper and automatically went to his locked door. Then it came back to him, and he had to fight himself to unlock it. Even then, he found himself ducking out like a thief.
Crossing the court to his mailbox, he forced his legs to slow down.
As he pulled his newspaper out of the mailbox, something fell.
A cheap white envelope.
Slowly, Mervyn stooped and picked it up.
No stamp or postmark. This one had been delivered by hand.
He went back to his apartment and locked the door and sat down and opened the letter.
It said:
Chapter 12
I’d better move to a motel or something, Mervyn thought wildly. Today. Right now. Before this maniac gives me what he gave Mary.
The thought that this might well be the last day of his life made no sense to him at all. It couldn’t be. Things like that didn’t happen except in books.
Then the memory of the curled-up thing that had been Mary Hazelwood, stuffed in the trunk of his convertible, leaped into his consciousness. It had happened. To Mary.
He had to do something. Run. Go to the police. Or hide from this nemesis who had murdered Mary and was trying to frighten him into paying for the crime.
Mervyn straightened up sharply. Trying to frighten him... Of course! “John” didn’t want to kill him! What would “John” gain by that? Confess, confess, the messages kept saying. That was it. Psychological warfare! Trying to break him down into turning himself in for something he hadn’t done, so “John” would go scot-free!
Mervyn groaned at his own imbecility. And at the same time a weight was lifted from his chest. He rose from the table grimly, looked around for a pencil, found one and went outside with no hesitation at all.
He had enlarged the bullet hole in digging the slug out; and he stuck the pencil in the hole and squinted toward where the pencil was pointing. Not the hedge; to the right of the hedge. From the empty lot. All right. Take it from there.
Looking over the lot in the light of day, he was even more perplexed. He had made for the gap in the hedge on the run, almost at once. His assailant could not have reached the street more than a few seconds before him. The man had not dodged into the barnlike garage; he could not have hidden on the garage roof; it was too high to reach without a ladder, and there was no ladder.
Again Mervyn considered the passages behind each of the buildings making up the complex. To the north the hedge forming one side of the passage was an impassable barrier. The south hedge showed a gap, but the passage beyond it came to a dead end at Perdue Street. Nor could the man have got through the opening where the hydrangea bush stood without leaving plain traces of snapped branches and broken blossoms — and there were none.
That left the fence separating the south six-plex from the next-door property. And here Mervyn found something he had missed the night before.
Directly under the fence lay a vegetable garden. The moist soil was undisturbed. Not a footprint to be seen.
No one had gone over the fence.
There must be an answer to this, Mervyn thought desperately. The facts say he didn’t go anywhere. Yet he vanished. How? Where?
That was when Mervyn, re-entering the court, almost bumped into the tall man in the gray suit.
The moment Mervyn laid eyes on the tall man he knew the man was a policeman. There was something about his sinewy length, the set of his jaw and the glint in his unwavering gray eyes in the weather-beaten Gary Cooperish face, that stamped him a lawman.
This is it, Mervyn thought. It’s caught up with me.
“Mr. Gray?” the tall man said. He had a slow, drawly sort of voice. “Mervyn Gray?”
Mervyn croaked, “Yes?” and thought, I probably look guilty already.
“I’m Lieutenant Hart of the Berkeley police.” He flipped open a wallet; Mervyn looked at it automatically. That’s who he was, all right. “I’ve been waiting for you. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“Sure,” Mervyn said on the third try. “Let’s go to my apartment.”
It was incredible how empty his head was. According to the books he should be thinking furiously, laying out a campaign of evasions or half-truths, clicking away like a computer. Instead — nothing. A vacuum. Boy, could I write a detective story! Mervyn thought.
In his apartment Mervyn said, “Sit down, lieutenant,” and he drew back the living-room drapes to let the sun in — let there be light, O Lord! — and braced himself for the first question about Mary Hazelwood.