And then he heard another sound – a slam, a click, a closed door. He wondered for a little while where it came from, then abruptly dropped his spoon and closed a pot, hurried to the Salle. The door was closed, locked.
He pounded on it lightly, then more heavily, then hard. A horrid sweat grew suddenly upon his flesh.
“Mercedes!” he shouted. “Are you there?”
There was no answer and no sound. He smiled a pea-green smile and tried to pull himself together. His nerves . . . Obviously an errant breeze had sprung. He need simply find the key . . . and . . .
The key, the only key, was inside, and this was a heavy, practically impregnable door. Ah, well, a locksmith . . .
“Bubu,” he called, but Bubu was in the cellar, and thunder quenched his voice. Thinking of keys, how could he have thought that Mercedes could be here? He himself had locked her door.
But wait! If she had traced the keys, and Vincent had made duplicates, then she, too, might . . .
From beyond the door there came – or did he only imagine it? – a faint, far hum, a tremulous, low-pitched moan of – what was it like, anticipation?
Etienne whirled, rushed up the stairs. Mercedes’ door was open. He shouted for her, shrieked her name. A crash of thunder worried away to silence. Dashing back down the stairs he fell, described a spinning parabola, and landed on his head. There was darkness . . .
He must have been unconscious for a full minute, perhaps more. When he sat up and ruefully rubbed his skull, it seemed that it was spring. Birds were singing, and a gentle fountain somewhere gently played. Then he knew it was the rain, a roaring cloudburst. And over it there was a great, expanding sigh of ecstasy that shook the house.
Etienne remembered then, and clawed his way along the corridor, weakly beat upon the door, and sobbed, “Mercedes!” And she answered him.
“Etienne!” she cried, and her sweet, tinkling voice was strained and harsh, like coarse silk tearing. “Etienne – I lied! I—”
And then her words were drowned in such a cataclysmic rhapsody of rapturous squeals and groans and slobbering slurrups of delight as to stun the ear and stop the heart. “Vincent!” she screamed at last, above this storm of gustatory joy, “Vincent, my love!”
And then her voice was stilled.
Bubu stood, his arms full of dusty bottles, staring down at his master in ajar-jawed astonishment. The rain had slacked, and in the garden Gertrude aped a nightingale, split the satin of her throat with melancholy song. And now the sounds beyond the door subsided slowly to a kind of satiated coda, a roundelay of little grunts and chucklings.
Etienne stumbled to his feet and stared unseeingly at Bubu. Then a little, very little life illumed his eyes.
“Fetch me the ax,” he said.
Mercedes’ robe was neatly folded on a chair, her spun-glass slippers glittered together on the floor. The Tasting Machine was silent, somnolent, its filament glowing with a blinding white-hot fever. Etienne took it gently into his arms and carried it to the cellar, held it poised for a moment above an open hundred-gallon cask of Thracian wine, then let it go. It came up thrice, and at the last time Etienne fancied – was it his overwrought imagination? – that it called out wispily for help, then choked and strangled, sank, and was entirely gone.
Back in the kitchen he opened an ironwood cabinet and removed a case of thin, brilliantly glistening knives, fell to sharpening them. Bubu was polishing glasses; Gertrude flew in through the open window, perched above the range, and preened her wet, bedraggled feathers.
“Pieces of eight,” she squawked. “Pieces of eight!”
The cuckoo clock on the floor above distantly caroled.
Etienne wondered, was it eight or nine? Or did it matter? He went to the slate, gazed at it reflectively for a little time, then slowly erased Hamburger 61st Street and scrawled in its place: Brochettes de Foie Vincent.
The front doorbell chimed.
“Please answer it,” he said to Bubu. “Sir Osbert Fawning and the Dowager Lady Swathe are often early.”
FINDERS KILLERS!
John D. MacDonald
We waited for him to run, because that was the final proof of guilt that we needed. We had him bottled up in a Chicago apartment. Our boys drove the cabs, delivered the milk, cleaned the street in front and in general covered him like a big tent. I don’t know exactly how we gave it away. But we did. We threw it to him.
You can say we were careless. That’s in the same league with Monday morning quarterbacking. Our excuse was that we didn’t know he was tipped. He walked into the apartment house and never came out again. Three hours later when we took the wire and tape off the fat woman across the hall from where he had lived, we learned how he’d used that cold, dark, drizzly evening to good advantage.
She was a tall woman, and fat. We knew he wore size 10B shoes. Hers were 9A. He tapped at her door. He hit her so hard that she still remembers hearing the tapping, but she can’t remember opening the door. Figuring the rest was easy. He merely undressed and wrapped his own clothes around his middle, tying them in place. Then he got into her clothes. He took her raincape and a big floppy hat. Maybe he’d taken the precaution of shaving himself closely. Maybe not. It was a dark night.
He walked out. Aragon, holding the night glasses on the apartment door, didn’t spot him. The boys in the cellar played back the recording of him going to bed. It was a sensitive pickup. I heard the shoes drop, the springs creak, the sleepy yawn.
And that was the way Torran walked out on us – walked out with two hundred and forty thousand dollars in brand new treasury notes in five-hundred dollar denominations – all in serial sequence, most of it still in the mint wrappers. In addition he had an estimated twenty-five thousand in smaller bills, all used stuff. He had a lot of the bonds, too. Negotiable stuff. Very hot. Even if they’d just dumped out the bank guards without the holes in the backs of their heads, the bonds would have been hot.
They had carried the guards across the Connecticut line before dumping them out. Torran and Holser. We knew that much. We didn’t have to worry about Holser. Some kids on a picnic found Holser a hundred feet from the highway. The thigh had gone bad under the dirty bandage. There was a hole in the back of his head. The slug matched the ones taken from the two guards.
There is not the slightest point in going over the history of how we located Torran. It was dull work. It took seven months. Then we had him bottled. We still couldn’t be certain that there wasn’t a third party involved. So we watched him. I was the one who advised against moving in and grabbing him. “Wait a little,” I said. “He’ll either run some more, or he’ll have company.” Either way, I thought, we couldn’t lose.
I’d been with it for seven months. By painstaking spade work I’d uncovered the initial lead that eventually led to him. I was a hero. So Torran slipped away. So I was a bum.
It took three days to prove we hadn’t the faintest idea whether he’d left town, and if so, how, and in what direction.
Broughton called me in.
His eyebrows look like white caterpillars. He looks like a deacon in the neighborhood church. He’s the Broughton who went into that New Orleans hotel room in ’37. He expected one man to be in there. There was a slip. There were four of them. When it was over, Broughton was still standing up. The lead he was carrying didn’t pull him down until he got back out into the hall. That Broughton!