Johnny had to step over the body on the floor to reach the door, and the doorknob was still turning in his hand after he unlocked it, when Lieutenant Dameron's impatient rush knocked the door away from him and brushed Johnny off balance against the wall as the lieutenant charged into the room. Behind him the slender figure of Detective Rogers stood poised on the threshold, alert and watchful, and then his eyes dropped to the body of the blond man on the floor just inside the door, and he froze.
Ronald Frederick caught the freeswinging door in his left hand before it hit the wall, and his revolver was dead center on the detective. “You. What's-you-name.” The voice was high and cracked. “Inside. Quick.”
Lieutenant Dameron turned in surprise, the beet-red features tightening as Detective Rogers reluctantly complied, and the manager reversed the flight of the door, which banged shut.
“Frederick?” Lieutenant Dameron asked doubtfully, and then stood very still as the revolver swung around and lined up on his belt buckle. “By God, I didn't recognize you. Put up that gun now-”
“Shut up!” Shrill overtones crackled in the already high-pitched voice, and the lieutenant shrugged and glanced at Johnny.
“I thought we'd find you here. What's the matter with your arm?”
Johnny glanced down at the blood-soaked left sleeve of his uniform and the red tricklings that ran down his wrist into his palm. “Pigeon kicked it.”
“I said shut up, all of you-!” The little man moved cautiously from the door and backed a little further away, the revolver nervously shifting from one to the other of the trio on the other side of the room. Johnny thought that the room suddenly seemed very full of silent, hard-breathing people. The revolver settled down on its aimless flight and leveled on the detective. “You. Got a gun?”
Jimmy Rogers nodded, lips compressed.
“Where?”
“Shoulder holster.”
“Don't reach for it. Get over to him, Johnny, but not in line with him.” Johnny pushed himself off the wall against which he had been leaning. “Get his gun. At arm's length, from the side. I want to see all of both of you every second. Get it in your fingertips. If I see it in your palm, I shoot. Prop it as soon as it clears the holster.”
The maneuver was carried out as delicately as a well-rehearsed ballet under the menacing snout of Frederick's revolver, and Johnny could see a muscle jumping in Jimmy Rogers' taut jawline as the police special thudded to the floor.
“Kick it over here.”
The sandyhaired man kicked, and the.38 slid spinning to the feet of Ronald Frederick, who looked immediately at the lieutenant.
“No gun, Frederick. Listen, don't be a-”
“I told you once, Dameron. Shut up!” The manager debated with himself, obviously doubtful. “Face the wall. All of you.”
Johnny stared at the wall after turning, and surreptitiously flexed the fingers of his left hand to test the reaction.
“You. On the left.” Rogers was on the left. “Lie down.
Full length.” From the corner of his eye Johnny could see the detective drop awkwardly to his knees and then sprawl out on his belly. “You, Johnny. On the floor. Move over a little first.” Johnny eased himself down, bracing himself on the good arm. “You, Lieutenant. To the right a little.” Johnny listened to the lieutenant's bulk thump to the floor. He turned his head fractionally and saw Ronald Frederick cautiously move in closer behind them. Johnny's knees tensed, but the little man knelt swiftly beside the police officer and expertly slapped and probed for the suspected weapon. Satisfied there was none, he stood upright again, a measure of self-control returning and lessening the jerk in his movements.
Lieutenant Dameron spoke quickly. “Frederick, you'd better give up on this right-”
“Didn't I tell you to keep quiet?” From his position on the floor Johnny could see the revolver slew around and jerk upward, and with the now familiar pop piaster flew from just above the baseboard midway between Johnny and the lieutenant. Johnny flinched involuntarily and glanced sideways just in time to see Lieutenant Dameron unhunching his neck. Behind them Ronald Frederick giggled, an eerie sound in the stillness of the room, and the lieutenant silently mouthed the word “Crazy!”
“All right, now.” The voice behind them tingled with electricity, and Johnny tensed again. “Down flat, everyone, and hold it flat. Heads down. First head up gets it.”
Johnny turned his left cheek to the floor and his eyes to the right. As he had expected Lieutenant Dameron had reversed the procedure, and they lay stiffly and looked at each other. Johnny strained to hear movement in the room behind them. For a moment he heard nothing, and then he recognized the scrape of metal on metal followed by a metallic click, and he realized with a surge of hope that Ronald Frederick was unlocking the bathroom door. The incredible little man still had not given up.
Strain as he might, Johnny could make out nothing further. Had the door closed again? He could not be sure. He realized suddenly that the lieutenant was trying to attract his attention. The mouthed whisper was an infinitesimal sound. “-he up to now-”
Johnny moistened his lips and replied in kind. “He's in the bathroom. I think.” He lay quietly a moment and suddenly made up his mind. “We got to move, Joe. Before he comes out.” He doubled his legs beneath him and pivoted on his stomach; the flesh around his ears prickled, but the bathroom door was closed and the room behind them was empty.
Johnny scrambled half-erect and nearly pitched forward on his face when he incautiously put his weight on the damaged left arm. Desperately he struggled to maintain his balance and then lifted his head sharply as a guttural, animalistic exclamation emerged from behind the closed door. From the floor Lieutenant Dameron's voice was almost normal as he whirled. “What the hell-7”
Johnny charged the door in a silent, murderous rush. As always in motion, he felt alive, exultant; everything was going to be all right. No time to check to see whether the door had been relocked from the other side; he hit it with his good shoulder with every ounce of steam he could generate, and metal shrieked and wood cracked. The door burst shiveringly inward as his own momentum carried him in behind it, and in the glaringly white brightness of the bathroom the scene was stamped out for him as on an etching.
Unbelieving, Johnny stared down at the body on the floor, at the snout-nosed revolver neatly balanced on the edge of the tub, and at a dazed Ronald Frederick, standing, wine glass in hand, gaping down at the woman at his feet.
“What is it?” Lieutenant Dameron demanded huskily behind Johnny, struggling to negotiate the splintered door now hanging crazily from a shattered hinge. He pushed in and fell silent.
“Jesus!” Jimmy Rogers breathed throatily behind them as he shoved inside and looked down in turn at Erika Muller's violently contorted figure and the dark blue and gray patches on the bloated features. “Another dead one!”
Wine glass still in hand, Ronald Frederick glared confusedly at them across the length of the bathroom. Whatever his previous frustrations and the final coruscating star-burst of events had done to him, this final crushing demolition of his last hope had shocked him back to sanity. His voice was almost normal when he spoke; he might have been delivering a lecture. “Saccharin. I put saccharin in her glass. The power of suggestion killed her. Or she had a bad heart. She was my last chance. My last chance-”
He stared at his silent audience, and the E string of his nerves tightened up again. His voice rose. “Saccharin, I tell you! Nothing more nor less. It couldn't kill her! It couldn't-!” He glared at them, half lifted the glass to dash it into the sink, then lifted it to his lips in a swift gesture and swallowed twice. “There, you see? Saccharin,” he said and swallowed dryly. Slowly he put the glass down in an unbalanced position on the sink's edge, and it toppled sidewise and crashed with a tinkly burst of glass fragments. Ronald Frederick did not appear to hear it. A hand went to his throat tentatively, almost questioningly, and Johnny realized with a start that he had been holding his own breath without realizing it.
Beside him Lieutenant Dameron stirred as though emerging from a trance. He strode to the sink, bent his head, and sniffed vigorously amidst the glass particles before straightening and turning to Johnny. “Can't smell a damn thing. What in hell did he put in there?”
“You heard him. Saccharin.”
“For God's sake, look at her-!”
Johnny hardly recognized his own voice. “She had her own.”
“She what?”
“She had her own poison. Freddie'd told her he'd poisoned the wine, but she might have thought he'd used a slow one. She knew hers was quick, so she dumped that in, too.”
“But then he just got the whole load-!”
“Sure he did. Drank it like a little man, didn't he?”
The lieutenant stared, then grimaced. “Jimmy-!”
“Right, Lieutenant. I'll have an ambulance here in nothing flat.” The sandyhaired man almost ran out the door, and the lieutenant swept a handful of towels from the rack and knelt beside the body of Erika Muller. He began to unfold towels and spread them lightly over the twisted limbs.
Johnny looked down at his own clenched hands; he walked back out into the bedroom and directly across to Jimmy Rogers at the telephone. He had to walk around him to get at him with his right hand.
“Switchboard?” the detective demanded and looked up inquiringly at Johnny. “Get me-” He had a hundredth of a second's warning, but it was not nearly enough. All the sick, bitter frustration that had welled up within Johnny at the sight of Erika Muller's body exploded in the right hand smash he unloaded on the completely unsuspecting detective's jaw. The slender man arced over sideways from the force of the blow, and when he landed he slid.
Johnny caught the falling phone in mid-air. “Sorry. Changed my mind.” He stepped over the unconscious man and returned to the bathroom. Lieutenant Dameron was just rising to his feet, brushing at his knees. Johnny pushed past him, pulled down the toilet seat cover, and sat down, almost face to face with Ronald Frederick, who sat balanced precariously on the edge of the tub.
Johnny looked at him closely. The slender features were flushed, the fingers digging into the side of the tub contracted and relaxed spasmodically, and a knee jerked slightly. The little man swallowed hard, and spoke with an effort. “Saccharin-”
“Sure, Freddie. Yours. Not hers. This the way you woulda picked to go?”
“What… you mean-?”
“Because this is the way you're going. And at that its too good for you.” He brushed past the watching lieutenant and leaned casually in the doorway before he spoke again. “Sweet dreams, Freddie.”
Lieutenant Dameron looked at him sharply. “You have to needle a man in his condition?”
“Who's needlin' him? I'm tellin' him. I want him to know.”
“Know? Know what?”
“Know that he's kickin' off with a gutful of poison, courtesy of Killain.”
“What the hell are you talking about? We'll have him pumped-” the harsh voice died; Lieutenant Dameron strode up to Johnny in the doorway. “What are you up to now? Get out of that door. Jimmy-”
“I took care of Jimmy. You're not gonna pump this guy out, Joe. This is my pigeon.”
The big man's hands closed and opened. “Don't be a bigger fool than nature made you, Johnny. He'll burn, anyway.”
“He might get life. I've seen it happen. This way we don't need to guess.”
Lieutenant Dameron glanced behind him. Ronald Frederick's glazing eyes stared unseeingly at the far wall. The slender body did a slow forward bend, doubled convulsively and pitched forward onto the floor on its knees, then writhed over on its back. A grayish pallor invaded the pinched features, and the lieutenant jerked around to Johnny. “Get the hell out of that doorway-!”
“Don't try it, Joe. I'm telling you.”
The ruddyfaced man backed off two steps, came up on his toes, looked at Johnny beside the splintered door, and hesitated. “For the last time, Johnny-”
“I knew you had more sense than to give me that free shot, Joe. You can have him in ten minutes.” Johnny's head came around sharply at a brisk series of knocks at the corridor door. He looked back at the lieutenant. “Did you have a rear guard?”
“You know damn well they'd have been in here before this if I did have,” Lieutenant Dameron growled.
The sudden knock on the door made them both jump. Somehow, Johnny knew who it was; he started for the door and then looked back. “Don't make the mistake of going for the phone.” He listened at the door. “'Who is it?”
“Open up, Johnny. It's Willie.”
“Yeah, Willie,” Johnny thought; he half-turned to look at the ruddyfaced man standing by the shattered door; after a long moment he reached out and took the knob gingerly and opened the door. Willie Martin strolled in, dapper in a dark brown lightweight gabardine complete with boutonniere in the lapel. He looked around critically as Johnny closed the door again, and his glance halted at the body of the blond man. “I just missed him in London,” he said conversationally.
“Shut up!” Johnny said under his breath.
Willie looked over at Jimmy Rogers sitting up on the floor, a hand to the side of his face and a lack of expression in his eyes. “And this one? Was he for, or against?”
Lieutenant Dameron spoke roughly; “That's my man, Willie. What the hell is this, a guided tour?”
“If you'll do the honors, Joe. You don't mind my checking up on things in my own place?” He moved over to the lieutenant in a saunter. “May I look over your shoulder, Joe?”
The ruddyfaced man hesitated, and then stepped aside from the doorway, and Willie Martin stood on its thresh-hold and quickly surveyed the interior of the brightly lighted room. With no visible change of expression he turned back into the bedroom; the lean mouth quirked humorously at the corners as he looked at Johnny. “I must say that tears it rather thoroughly.” He walked around the card table and seated himself on the edge of the bed; his tone was absentminded as he continued. “Had the very devil of a time getting off that plane you put me on, Johnny, without your seeing me.”
Lieutenant Dameron stared at him; Johnny stood frozen, every internal muscle strained with the repression of the sound welling up within him. He wanted to scream until his throat was raw: Willie… Willie… don't… don't… don't…!
Willie smiled at him, the cheerful, devil-may-care smile. “I gave it all I had, Johnny. As usual. It was leaning on broken reeds that destroyed me. First Dumas… and now Frederick-”
Lieutenant Dameron's stare was frozen incredulity. On the floor Detective Rogers was looking up intently with eyes that had come back into focus. Willie Martin looked amusedly from one to the other.
“The long arm of the law,” he said softly and stood up and moved away from the bed, his manner deliberate and unhurried; under the expensive gabardine jacket his shoulders moved slightly in the fashion of a man testing unused muscles.
The lieutenant's apple cheeks were faded. He took a short step forward; his voice was tentative. “Willie-”
The slender man turned casually to the nearer window; he looked back over his shoulder, the easy smile a mockery.
“Yes, Joe?” he asked quietly, and his eyes passed on to Johnny.
“Next incarnation, boy,” Willie Martin said casually and turned back to the window.
“Willie-!” This time it was the imperative flavored Lieutenant Dameron's official voice. Then his bull-like rush ended up in a sliding skid as he encountered Johnny's out-thrust leg. From hands and knees on the floor Johnny winced at the earsplitting crash as the doubled up figure took sashing and pane on its flight through the window.
The tinkling sound of glass falling could be heard for a long time in the quiet room.
Johnny awoke lying on his back in the instant before the awakening hand touched his shoulder; he blinked up at the blue uniform. “He's ready for you now, Killain.”
“Yeah. Thanks, Mac.” He lay quietly an instant, his eyes tracing the barred pattern of the lights and shadows on the ceiling above him before he sat up on the iron cot in the precinct cell block.
His left arm throbbed like an infected wisdom tooth; he stood up, balancing cautiously. After treatment last night, the police surgeon had strapped it tightly to his chest, and he felt curiously one-sided.
The cell door was ajar, and he stepped outside and walked across to the little desk fronting the row of cells. He looked down into the shrewd pale eyes of the uniformed patrolman. “Cigarette me, Mac.”
He caught the pack of cigarettes tossed to him, shook one out, and bowed his head the distance necessary to accept the proffered light. He nodded his thanks and strode out through the big iron gate, off the cement floors of the cell block to the familiar oil-darkened wooden floors of the old building. He could hear the sound of his heels echoing in the early morning quiet.
Johnny knocked on the door of Lieutenant Dameron's office, but Detective Rogers opened the door. Jimmy Rogers had a sizable swelling on his jaw and a vivid discoloration that ran up his cheek and merged with a multicolored black eye. Johnny inspected his handiwork critically. “Mornin', Jimmy. Run into a door?”
The sandyhaired man stood aside silently to let him in, and Johnny looked across the room an instant at the big man behind the desk. Lieutenant Dameron's redrimmed eyes were sunken, and the florid cheeks liberally sprinkled with a silver stubble. He looked up from a litter of papers at Johnny's entrance and nodded to a chair. “Sit down.”
“Just one minute, Joe.” Johnny turned to Detective Rogers. “You got a legitimate beef, kid. I took a sucker shot at you last night, but Joe here'll tell you I pay my bills.” He walked over to the detective. “Go ahead, kid; shoot your wad. Let's see you land one right about here.” He extended his chin and pointed to the mandible, and Jimmy Rogers left the floor with the gusto with which he propelled a roundhouse right to within a quarter inch of Johnny's pointing finger. Johnny went backward on his heels in a staggering trot. A chair caught him behind the knees, and he was on his way down when his shoulders hit the wall behind him with a crash that shook the room and bounced him upright again.
Johnny shook his head gingerly and found his voice after a moment. “Not bad.” He waggled his jaws gently, experimentally. “Not bad at all. You eat another barrel or two of flour you'll be a man yet.”
“I knew I could put you down,” Detective Rogers said with deepest satisfaction, blowing on his knuckles.
“If the charades are over, let's get down to business,” the lieutenant said from the desk. His voice was a tired rumble. Jimmy Rogers pushed a chair over to Johnny, and they both sat down. “The least said about certain aspects of last night the better, but we are going to have to talk about this a little.” The gray eyes bored into Johnny, who shrugged. “When did you first think of Willie?”
“When he walked in that door,” Johnny said wearily. “He thought I knew, from what he said, but I didn't I'd never have given you-”
He stopped, and the lieutenant looked at him. “You'd never have given us even the left-handed help that you did? I realize that. Just like the leg trip you gave me when I tried to get him away from the window.”
“You want to make something out of it, you go right ahead, Joe. I spent a lot of time gettin' Willie out of spots like that.” He stared at a point on the wall above the lieutenant's head. “This time, though, I didn't get much cooperation from him.”
“Are you interested in knowing why?”
“Maybe I know why.”
The big man glanced down at the papers on his desk.
“Maybe. We'll probably never know exactly, but in my book Willie Martin had two gods: money and excitement. He lived his whole life at the top of the scale; as long as he had the money he could more or less legitimize the excitement.” He turned over the papers before him. “But he didn't have the money. Not any more. I rousted that lawyer of his out of bed last night, and he admitted that Willie was dependent upon the hotel for income and that the hotel itself was about two and a half jumps ahead of the receiver.”
Johnny leaned back in his chair with his eyes dosed. “Does it make any difference now?”
“We have to tie the ribbon on these packages. We finally ran that Myrna Hansen to ground late last night, and she filled in the missing details. Willie had gone commercial, He'd been using his overseas contacts-and with his background he probably had dozens-to obtain information for him that was worth a good deal of money to the right people. Or the wrong people. This microfilm deal was a new phase. According to this woman, Willie engineered the original steal from a European foreign office ministry. Then he was doublecrossed, and the film stolen from his man. That was Myrna's team: Muller and his wife, the two Rieders, and a man in the hotel by the name of Dobson that nobody had ever taken a second look at. I've got him under glass right now.”
He looked at Johnny sitting slumped in his chair. “You'd be surprised at the reaction on those films. I've had three phone calls already this morning from echelons of brass congratulating me for winding this thing up.”
Johnny's mouth twisted. “Let me congratulate you, too, Joe.”
“Don't strain yourself. To conclude the story, when Willie's European contact was robbed of the film, Willie set up the machinery to recover it. He set Frederick up at the hotel with all the other apparatus, but he made a final try at recovering it himself. He flew to London to try to head off Muller, but he missed connections.”
“He asked me to go,” Johnny said almost to himself.. “He said he'd get me a seat on the plane. But he didn't say why-if he'd only said why-”
“It's a damn good thing for you he didn't,” Lieutenant Dameron said sharply. “And you ought to know why. Willie was the padrone, the benevolent despot. He couldn't ask anyone for help; that was going against the grain. Willie had to maintain the picture of himself as a distributor of sunshine.”
“You figure his girl in the apartment was bleeding him?” Johnny asked after a moment.
Lieutenant Dameron looked at him carefully. “The answer to that has to be 'yes,' but don't you go getting any ideas. We'll take care of her, understand?” He stood up behind the desk. “Officially I'm going to forget parts of last night.”
“Don't do me any favors, Joe. I can pack the assigned weight on any kind of racetrack.” He rubbed at his eyes tiredly with his free hand. “I do owe you one bouquet though. When you boarded the ship there last night, I was only forty-sixty to get a draw with Freddie, and I couldn't have sold many shares in the proposition, either. We were both on the floor, and he had the gun. I think I'd've kept going long enough to make sure he didn't enjoy much prosperity, but beyond that I needed a fresh deck.”
To his left Detective Rogers cleared his throat. “Your girl's waiting outside,” he told Johnny.
“Yeah? Since when?”
“Since all night.”
“Christ.” Johnny stood up. “You couldn't get her to go home?”
“Did you want me to pull a gun on her?”
“All right, all right.” Johnny looked at Lieutenant Dameron. “That's it, Joe?”
“That's it. Do me a favor, Johnny. Stay out of my sight for a while. My nerves aren't what they used to be.”
Johnny nodded to each of the two men in turn; Detective Rogers was putting on his jacket and the lieutenant was locking his desk when Johnny closed the door from the outside. Sally was asleep sitting up on the bench just beyond the big desk at the entrance. He shook her gently, and the brown eyes flew open. She stared up at him un-comprehendingly for a moment, and then silent tears started to flow. “Cut it out, ma. Cut it out.”
“Oh, Johnny-” She stood up and tried to put her arms around him, then backed off and looked down at the strapped arm. “What happened? The lieutenant said you were all right-!”
“As usual, ma, the lieutenant is correct.”
“But your arm-!”
“I zigged when I should've zagged. Let's get out of here.”
In the cab he held her in the good arm all the way over to the apartment. Upstairs with the door closed she turned to him, and the brown eyes were anxious. “Johnny-”
“Post mortems later, ma. You got to get some sleep. Your eyes look like two burnt holes in a blanket. Hop in the sack.”
“Are you coming?”
“In a little while.” He eased himself down in his chair when she walked into the bedroom, but hoisted himself up almost immediately and walked out to the kitchen. From the cabinet he took down the bourbon bottle, and a little awkwardly poured himself a drink. He lifted it and studied it absently against the light, then on impulse walked into the bathroom. Drink in hand he examined the mirror the deep, dark circles under the eyes and the bronzed, barb-wire stubble on the jawline.
He threw back his head and drained the glass, swallowed hard, shuddered, and looked back into the mirror again at the lips drawn down thinly at the corners of the hard mouth. He spoke bitterly to the face in the mirror.
“'Goodbye, my friend. I have a certain familiarity with losing causes.'“ He cleared his throat, and put down the empty glass. “If you hadn't felt like playin' God, Ugly, you could've kept her alive. You think you can maybe convince yourself one of these days she probably really died a dozen years ago?”
He became aware that a sound impinging upon his consciousness was the dripping of water. He walked to the shower stall and turned the faucet viciously, and looked down a little blankly at the imprint of the metal in his palm.
He turned aimlessly back to the mirror; his voice when he spoke again was a husky whisper. “Willie-”
He broke away from the mirror and went into the bedroom. He looked down at the thin body on the bed, already asleep on top of the covers. He found a lightweight robe in the closet which he drew over her; she murmured in her sleep, breaking the rhythm of her breathing.
Johnny removed his clothes, with difficulty because of the strapped arm. He had trouble bending for shoelaces, but he got the shoes off. As he struggled out of the trousers he noticed the stains and abrasions in the fabric, and all too quickly his thoughts were back in Room 1224. He put it firmly from his mind.
He lay down on the further side of the bed, cautiously, so as not to disturb the sleeper. He eased himself onto his back, and threw the good arm behind his head. With his eyes he traced the sunlight on the ceiling, and the familiar smudges, cracks, and shadows.
In a little while he would sleep.