I was almost at the top of the stairs. The upper hallway was hot and very dark. I fumbled for the light switch; and then I sensed that I was not alone. A rustle of cloth, a whisper of breathing, and I knew another presence was in the hallway with me.
I was not afraid at first; no time for that. Only jarred to a sudden immobility. The instant of my indecision was my undoing. And then terror!
The gun crashed and a tongue of flame lashed toward me. It was quite close. A searing pain shot through my head and I had the swift sensation of a sickness like vertigo multiplied a thousand times. There seemed to be nothing beneath me except black nothingness. I fell, loose jointed and with a complete lack of control over my limbs. End over end, elbows bumping, legs flying like strands of rubber, I jolted all the way to the foot of the stairs, to the parquetry of the entry foyer.
I jolted to rest with my limbs at awkward angles. I could feel no pain now. I could, in fact, feel nothing, except the wild terror that came with this feeling nothing.
I tried to move, and could not. I was wrapped in a blackness, a helplessness that made of my body a lump of cold clay. Then I heard the footsteps coming down the stairs, and I seemed to know that they belonged to a man. A light fell on my face, and I guessed that my eyes were open; for I could see the light like the haze of a faint moon almost obscured by clouds.
The light moved. He had moved. I heard his breathing, like two skeins of silk being rubbed together. I supposed that he was giving me a quick examination by the light of a flashlight. What he witnessed must have satisfied him. The light vanished, and after a considerable time I decided that I was again alone.
As I became accustomed to this numb lack of sensation, some of the sickening fear of it left me. I was feeling no tiredness; no pain, as if in the next moment I might swoop off to some world beyond the stars. The images of my thoughts were possessed of that same peculiar weightlessness that had taken my body.
Was this the experience of death? The question did not seem at all surprising to me right then, but very concrete and real. I doubt that I would have been surprised had several beings of this strange world floated forward to bid me welcome to their company.
I was human, and therefore concerned first with myself. Next followed a flood of questions regarding the man who had shot me. I didn’t doubt that the murder had been a deliberate one. He had known I would turn out the study light, cross the living room with its dim night light and walk up the stairs.
Had it been a burglar? I dismissed that possibility. The smart second story man never enters a house with the male head present and visible — as I had been through the open study window. Neither does the smart house-breaker carry a gun. The risk of a much stiffer sentence — even the chair — if caught armed is too great.
There was still the remote chance of course that he’d been a very dumb second story artist, but in that case he would have bolted and run. Instead this man had been cool, in full possession of his nerve as evidenced by the fact he’d followed me down to make sure he’d done the job right. His examining me before taking flight was proof enough that he’d been waiting in that upper hall for the express purpose of murdering me.
But why? Doug Townsend had few enemies — and those Lew Whitfield and every policeman in Santa Maria could also claim. I’d only been a part of every investigation I’d worked so far. If some minor hood had finished his sentence I had done nothing to provoke him to return and commit murder. True, there was young Loren Sigmon, whose crime I’d eyewitnessed. But he was safely in jail. So there seemed little possibility that my work or anything connected with it was the motive for my murder.
I experienced a fresh fright at the detached manner in which my mind could view the situation. This was me! Put a few tears into it! This is personal, Townsend.
Personal, but still a problem in criminology, and my mind went ahead in its own fashion, as if, being released from body, it was for a time released from all emotional hedges also. Coolly, my mind went about the business of sorting out motives for murder. There are only two, provided the murderer is not insane. Passion, and gain.
Passion was most probably out. I had quarreled with no one, insulted no one; I had not been sufficiently vicious to drive anyone to murder.
Was a killing for gain to be any more seriously considered? Wealth of course is a relative matter, and it was possible that my earthly possessions, a good home, two cars, several decent investments that were putting money in the bank, were great enough for someone to value them higher than my life. But those things of course would all go to Vicky once this inert hulk at the foot of the stairway was buried.
There was only one possibility left, a mixture of the two motives. Passion and gain so interwoven that the motive became a single driving force. A desirable woman, plus the estate of the deceased.
Can hell hold any greater torture? The desirable woman. Vicky. The deceased. Doug Townsend.
In desperate agony I wanted to be done with this reasoning. But my mind, with a grim, macabre relentlessness clung to that one idea, for there was no other with any substance.
Perhaps he had been plotting this very act that night I’d been so close to him, when only the curtain of darkness on the Bath Club terrace hid him from me.
Fresh light came, a shimmering in a fog. Footsteps moved toward me, around me. Someone had heard the shot and hurried to the scene...
I couldn’t see him. Just one flick of my eye muscles would have put him in a line with my vision, but the muscles were dead, powerless and the vision was dim and distorted.
I experienced a great need for his presence. He was human — he was living. Don’t go away! Look at me and tell me that this is not death!
A door slammed and fresh footsteps whispered into my foggy world. They stopped then came forward with a rush. “Doug! Oh, Doug!”
It was Vicky. Thank heaven, in that moment the sound of her voice was too dear for me to think of murder and its motives. Whatever the man had done, Vicky had had no part of it. Vicky would never be a party to a thing like this.
Right then I could have forgiven her of anything. I had never needed her more. The presence of living human beings had driven a fresh awareness of my present state through me. A fresh terror.
Surely she would drop by my side. Her hands would touch me. Yet the moment lengthened and I heard a voice, Shoffner’s. “Easy, Mrs. Townsend. You look pretty green. I heard something that sounded like a shot and ventured to come in just a few seconds before you got here. Don’t you think we’d better call a doctor and the police?”
He must have helped her to a chair. She moaned softly and the moan mutated into weak, soft sobbing.
“Yes, the police. How could he have done it?” And then she whispered brokenly, “Oh, Doug — how could you?”
If I had hoped there was a limit to the depths of torture, I knew better now. For a moment her words brought only a stunned, blank nothingness to my mind; then the insinuation behind them began to sink in. I didn’t understand. Desperately I thought, Darling, if I could look at your face at this moment, would I see something there I’ve never beheld before?
The last prop beneath my world was shattered completely. I might possibly have accepted oblivion right then; but oblivion failed to come. If this were death, then death was far from oblivion.
Only minutes passed before they came. The doctor. The police. My co-workers. I don’t know how many of them there were. At times it seemed the room was filled with the babble of many voices; then again there was the silence of emptiness.
Lew Whitfield came, of course. I sensed it was he when I heard the elephantine pad of footsteps on the foyer carpet. He stood over me during one of those silences before going down the two short steps that led to the living room.