I HAD no trouble. I went to Roxy’s motor court and parked in front of the restaurant. I went inside. There were some people around, in the restaurant. I went up the stairs, to Roxy’s office. I unlocked the door, shut it behind me. I took the small brown bottle, sealed with masking tape, from the desk drawer. I put it in my pocket and went downstairs. A few people may have noticed me, but they paid no particular attention.
It was after five o’clock when I reached Highway Patrol headquarters and the office girls were streaming down the broad steps to the street. I walked into the lobby, nodded to a couple of troopers I knew, turned left down a long hallway past Troop F headquarters and the communications center until I came to a door marked Admittance for Official Business Only and, in the lower right hand corner of the opaque glass, Lt. Darryl McHane.
I went inside. Fading sunlight fell through slanted venetian blinds and striped the floor, tinted the glass doors of the bookcases with sunset colors. My footsteps sounded discreetly on the composition tile. No one seemed to be around. I went through a doorway into the lab.
Lieutenant McHane stood inside with his hands clasped behind his back, scrutinizing a couple of smears on slides beneath petri dishes. There was a towel with many brown stains on the bakelite sink top nearby. McHane wore a full-length apron over his uniform of light blue shirt and dark blue trousers.
“How’s the apothecary business?” I said.
He turned without haste and peered at me over rimless glasses. “If it isn’t the small-town dick,” he murmured. “Long time no see, hayseed.”
“You know how it is in my line of work,” I said. “Never any time to visit my pals.” McHane is a stockily built, meek-looking man with a big nose, morose eyes and thinning hair. He has college degrees in chemistry and philosophy, boasts a vast intricate knowledge of law. This is usually apparent only at trials when he is called upon to testify on behalf of laboratory evidence. He loves to confound smart defense lawyers who fall for his meek act and try to invalidate his lab findings. It’s a pleasure to watch him work, although most of the lawyers in the state are on to him by now.
We shook hands solemnly. “Since when are you running your own blood tests?” I asked him.
“Cleve is over at St. Kit’s with his bride of nine months and an imminent baby,” he said. “I’ve just been preparing some reagent.”
“Have time to do me a favor?”
He wiped his palms on the apron. “Well, you know how bloodstain analysis is. Slow as molasses. Slower. Takes three or four days, if all you’ve got is dried on a towel like that.” He looked unobtrusively at his watch. “What you want done?”
I took the bottle I had stolen from Roxy’s office out of my pocket. “I need to know what’s in this.”
He stretched out his hand. “Let’s see.” He took the bottle and held it up to the dwindling light of the windows, turned it around several times with his fingers.
“Any idea what it is?”
“Just a hunch. I wouldn’t want to influence your decision any.”
“Any idea how old it is?”
“About a year.”
“Unh-hunh.” He took a single-edged razor blade from a cardboard box on the sink and carefully incised the masking tape, unscrewed the lid of the small bottle. He sniffed the contents carefully, several times, inhaling clean air between each appraisal of the liquid. Then he held out the bottle to me.
“What you smell?”
I sniffed a couple of times, frowned. “Whiskey, I think. Pretty faint.”
“Can see you’re not a drinking man,” he said. “Scotch. Good Scotch once, before somebody denatured it with soda pop.” He indulged in another long reflective sniff. “Anything else?”
“That’s all I could smell. Of course, I don’t have your nose.”
“True.” He stroked the nose fondly with one finger. “There is something else, though. Vague. I can hardly place it.”
“Toxic, maybe?”
“To say the least.”
“How long would it take you to isolate it?”
“Not long, if it’s what I think.”
He touched a switch near the door and cold bars of neon flared. I leaned against the refrigerator and watched him. “What’s in the ice box, McHane?”
“A pickled stomach, a cocker spaniel’s liver and a couple of Coca-Colas,” he said. “Help yourself to a Coke. While you’re drinking it go into the other room and type out a statement for me. You know what I want on it. Date, time, what you brought in, why. Sign your name.”
I did that. I did not mention that I was suspended. By the time I had pecked out with one finger the information he wanted and added my signature he came out of the lab with the bottle.
“I only needed a little of it,” he said. “I resealed the bottle.”
“What did you find?”
“Scotch and soda pop. Some kind of mixer, I guess. Also a quantity of cyanide. Not a whole lot. Just enough to make this concoction lethal.”
I sighed. “How long would it take the person who drank some of it to die?”
He rubbed his nose, pointed to a chair across the room. “After four or five good swallows with some witty conversation interspersed he would about have enough time to walk over to that chair and sit down before it hit him. It would hit him like a tree falling on his head.”
“That fast.”
“It ain’t slow, pal. Not slow at all. Not cyanide. It’s a handy sort of toxicant, too, if you’re intent on doing somebody in. Found in silver polish, for example.” The glasses slipped a little on his nose and he looked at me over them. “I suppose this will put me in court before long.”
“I couldn’t say, McHane.”
I took the bottle, exchanging it for the information he had requested. He initialed the sheet and folded it, put it away. “Time to stay and talk?”
“I wish I could. I’ll buy you a dinner some time next week.”
“Fair enough. So long, copper.” He turned and trudged back into his laboratory.
Outside the round orange sun was shrouded in haze. Dusk settled swiftly as I took myself and my car home. My feet made lonely sounds on the gravel driveway as I walked toward the apartment house. I used my key to disengage the lock on the door of the basement entrance, and pushed the door inward. The night light inside was out. The door had locked shut behind me before I remembered having seen the janitor put in a new bulb two days ago.
The arm closed around my neck abruptly, crushing the breath from my throat. I was bent backward slightly, so that I couldn’t struggle and still keep my feet on the floor. My flailing hands found nothing in the blackness. My coat was slapped aside and I felt the .45 slipped from its holster. Blood thudded in my temples, and there were bright red explosions behind my eyes. I lost interest in trying to fight. I just wanted to breathe. I put both hands to the arm across my throat and tugged.
I felt his breath on the back of my neck, smelled the stale fruity odor of chewing gum. The arm went away from my throat then and I was shoved suddenly. I stumbled against a wall and fell down, held my bruised throat. I whispered a curse. The light came on, and I looked up, at my gun and the man who pointed it at me.
DONNY ARLENE TOOK HIS HAND AWAY FROM THE LIGHT BULB he had tightened in the ceiling socket and grinned.
“Hello, good friend of mine,” he said softly.
“I came to tell you Roxy wants to see you.”
“Why the muscle?”
“Roxy said you might not want to see him. He said this was the best way. I wouldn’t hold this gun on you, but Roxy said the badge in your pocket don’t mean any more than a bottle top now. You can stand up.”
I stood up. My throat was still hurting. Donny waved the gun at the door. “Your car,” he said, with a jaunty confident grin. We went outside, and he got into the front seat with me. He had put the .45 in his coat pocket and was holding his stiletto, the blade out. He sat facing me on the seat with the knife hand balanced on his knee, the point of the blade close to my side. He told me to drive slow.
“If I stick you with this,” Donny said, “it would make you bleed a lot. Some people get hysterical when they see themselves bleed. I’ve seen it happen.” His lips smacked rhythmically as he chewed gum. He hummed softly. We were going to a picnic, and Donny was bringing the meat.
Roxy didn’t smile at me after Donny had conducted me into his office.
“You took something from me, Bill,” he said grievously. Somebody had put one over on him, and he was suffering humiliation. “You came into my office and took something from me.”
“Took what, Roxy?”
“You know what you took. You took the bottle. I want it back.”
“Maybe Dr. Einhorn took it, Roxy.”
He shook his head impatiently. “No. I talked to him. He knows better. He says he didn’t take it. I believe him. I don’t believe you. I know you’ve got it. Donny, shut up that humming and search him if you haven’t done it already.”
“No need to bother, Roxy. The bottle’s in my coat pocket.”
“Get it out.”
I took the bottle from my pocket carefully, mindful of Donny and his knife. I tossed the thing to Roxy and he caught it nervously with both hands.
“What was the idea, Bill? What did you want with the bottle? What made you think you could just take it?”
I didn’t answer. To my right Donny folded his knife and put it away. He had one eye on the painting of love among the daisies and the other on me.
“I’m going to call Gulliver,” Roxy said. “You just lost any chance you ever had of getting back in good with him. He’ll run you right out of town for this.” His hand descended to the receiver of the telephone.
“You don’t want to call him,” I said. “Get your goddam hand off that telephone.”
His head jerked up and he stared at me numbly.
“If you do call him, Roxy,” I said, “I’ll have something to say too. I know about the bottle. Where it came from and what’s in it, why it’s important. I know all that. Gulliver will listen to me. Even a man like Gulliver has to draw the line somewhere, Roxy. You’re way over the line he would have to draw.”
Roxy studied me, his face shadowed in the light cast by a standing lamp near the desk. It was the only light in the office. He had control of himself again. He didn’t seem worried.
“Why don’t you go down to the bar and have a drink, Donny?” Roxy suggested. “Come back in about fifteen minutes.”
Donny raised a hand in agreeable salute and left without looking at me again. Roxy sat on the edge of his desk and brushed his small mustache with a finger, as if reassuring himself.
“What do you know, Bill?” he said calmly.
I leaned against the wall near the door, my hands against the smooth cold white leather that partially covered the walls. “The bottle contains a highball with a fatal dose of cyanide. I think Kelly Anne Fisher was drinking it when she died. Somebody put the cyanide in her glass knowing that when she died it would be blamed on her heart. It could have been just about anybody, including you, because Kelly Anne was highly unpopular at the time. I know that Dr. Einhorn suspected or was able to tell she hadn’t died of a heart attack and saved some of the drink to prove it.”
“And why would Dr. Einhorn give me the bottle?” Roxy said, his voice almost inaudible. He was finding strength somewhere. His eyes were softly confident.
“He made a mistake once,” I said. “You were around to mark it down in your book.” I walked closer to the desk. His eyes followed me almost dreamily.
“You can’t prove where it came from, Bill. You know that. Dr. Einhorn will never talk. You’re wasting your time, and mine. You can’t prove Kelly Anne died from it. You can’t prove somebody put the cyanide in her glass.”
“No, I can’t prove it. Not yet. I won’t stop trying, though.”
Roxy laughed, the surprisingly hearty sound beating against the shadowy tension in the office.
“I know, Bill. You’ll keep trying. That’s why I have to admire you. I should hate you. But you’re too much like me, Bill. No. You’re more what I wish I could be. You’re smart and tough. You’re not sure what you want, but you’re fighting to prove something to yourself. You’ll keep trying to prove that Dr. Einhorn and I are guilty of some crime. But I don’t want you to. I don’t want you to waste your time. I want you with me.”
His voice had become husky, compelling.
“I need you, Bill. I need you with me. Together we can find what we’re looking for. Together we’ll have the strength to fight anybody.” He slid off the desk, stood behind it. “Oh, Bill,” he said. His eyes pleaded with me. “What we can do together. We’ll go so far nobody can touch us. Men like Gulliver will thank us for allowing them to pick up our discarded cigarette butts. Please, Bill. Don’t fight me. Come with me.”
“You’ll never see the day,” I told him.
His eyes widened in dismay. “Bill, listen to me. What do you want? Money, women? You want men to twist like dolls? That’s what you want, Bill. You’re like me. I know.” His face was tight with anxiety, his lips firm with an odd, almost sexual excitement as he tried to measure me within the confined scope of his own desires. “Don’t just look at me, Bill!” His voice cracked with an uncertain sob. I said nothing. He leaned forward against his desk, his eyes on my face, demanding. “What do you want, Bill!”
“I want something to believe in,” I said. I hadn’t been thinking it. I didn’t know I was going to say it. But in some way the words represented a final transition, a long delayed completion of manhood. “I can’t believe in you, Roxy. You’re just a shadow anyway, of bigger men with bigger desires. You don’t have any real meaning.” I walked up to the desk.
There was a sound that came from Roxy, a tight high little squeal some animal might make in anticipation of death. The middle desk drawer opened. I saw his hand go in and come out. In the chalky yellow light from the lamp beside the desk I saw a revolver in his hand. I kicked out viciously. The lamp fell, the bowl shattering against the desk.
In the darkness I backed cautiously away. There was no shot. I couldn’t hear Roxy. I pushed off my shoes and went to my knees, crawled across the rug to the leather-bordered walls.
I waited there.
It was very still.
I waited for what seemed a long time, crouched, breathing shallowly. I waited for him to crack.
After a while Roxy said, “Bill?”
I said nothing.
He repeated, “Bill?” I could hear him move uncertainly then, as if he had shifted his weight. Then something heavy fell against the bottom of the desk drawer.
“I put the gun in the drawer,” Roxy said hopefully.
I said nothing.
He picked the gun up again. I heard it scrape against the drawer. He swung the cylinder out, removed the slugs. He dropped them, one by one, into the drawer. He put the gun in, too. He shut the drawer.
I stood up, felt along the wall for the light switch and turned on the overhead light. I put my shoes on.
Roxy looked as if he had just vomited. He leaned against the desk, his face pale. He licked at his lips with a small pink tongue.
“I didn’t have anything to do with Kelly Anne,” he said.
“I don’t know.”
“What about Richard Olson?”
His head came up. “Who?” His eyes were puzzled, behind the glaze of despair.
“The man you know as Leland Smithell. He was Richard Olson three years ago when he took a bank in New York for forty thousand dollars and disappeared. Leland Smithell was murdered about ten days ago. He had some of the stolen money in a suitcase in the basement. There could have been anywhere up to fifteen thousand in the suitcase. It was all gone. Whoever killed Smithell knew about the money, took it. Next to the suitcase was a trunk with a dead man in it. Smithell had killed him. Through information about this murdered man we uncovered Smithell’s past.”
He shook his head. “I . . . don’t know anything about that. I didn’t even know the man.”
“But I think you know about Kelly Anne,” I said.
“No. Believe me.”
“Does Dr. Einhorn know who killed her?”
Roxy sat down in his chair, his hands folded tightly together. He was through talking to me. He was talking to himself now, silently.
“I’m going to see him,” I said. “Don’t tip him, Roxy.”
He looked up, his eyes blinded by remorse. I don’t think he heard me. He was slowly coming unstuck. I could sense the effort he was making to remain whole. His hands trembled.
I went downstairs to the bar. Donny Arlene was drinking Scotch and giving a fast deft line to a slim blonde girl dressed too maturely for her age who sat very straight and didn’t look at Arlene, and who seemed to have part of her attention focused on some inward voice.
I tipped him on the shoulder. “Pardon me,” I said.
He turned on the bar stool. His smile gleamed. “My friend,” he said.
“The gun,” I said.
He took it from his coat pocket fondly and gave it to me. The curly headed blonde had unbent enough to look at us as the exchange was made. Her face was thin and delicately pretty, but immature. She looked from the gun to Arlene, and seemed frightened. As he turned back to the bar the back of his hand trailed along her slim thigh tightly bound in a blue skirt, touched her bare knee. Her fingers tightened nervously on the glass in front of her. She drank. She looked at Arlene, at the dark smooth features. His smile was reassuring. She smiled back, weakly, seemed to lean toward him. Another sacrifice looking for an altar.
DR. EINHORN LIVED IN A LARGE ENGLISH-STYLE FIELDSTONE house cozily wrapped in old ivy in a good section of town. There were lights on all over the house but nobody answered my persistent rings. I tired quickly of leaning on the doorbell and tried the door. It was unlocked. I went inside.
The living room was to my left, a couple of steps down. A staircase to the upper floor was at my right.
“Hello,” I said, to the impassive furniture. No one answered. No dog came yapping toward me from within the house.
But there was a sound.
It came from upstairs, indistinctly, so that I listened closely for it to be repeated again, as if I hadn’t really heard it at all. I heard the tiny sound of a sob again.
I went upstairs, my feet silent on the carpeted steps. Directly ahead, at the end of a short hall, was a bedroom. I could see the double bed inside. A black doctor’s bag was on the bed. All lights were on in this room, too. I went inside. I was following the sound now.
I found him in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet, leaning over the bathtub. He was naked. Clenched in the fingers of his right hand was a double-edged razor blade. There were several scratches on his left wrist. He had tried. His face was clenched, too, as wrinkled as a new baby’s, as if he were filled with a sob so gigantic that he couldn’t force it out. His lips were parted. He saw nothing. He heard nothing.
On the floor lay a photograph of a middle-aged woman. He had scrawled on it in eyebrow pencil, Forgive me Martha. I took the blade from him. His eyes didn’t move.
“All right,” I said, “all right.” I felt afraid. I took him by the shoulder. He didn’t respond.
I dropped the blade into a wastebasket beneath the wash bowl. I knew I should hit him to try to bring him out of it. I couldn’t make myself do it. I went back into the bedroom. I looked again at his bag on the bed. He could have done it easier. Maybe the draining of blood was to have had some meaning for him. I shook my head.
Someone came up the stairs. A stout woman about fifty years old, hair beauty-parlor gray, body almost shapeless in a light gray suit. She wore a small black hat. The woman in the picture. She looked at me with hard surprise.
“Who are you?” she said, coming into the bedroom. “Where’s my husband?”
“Sergeant Randall,” I said automatically. “Cheyney police. I came to talk to . .
She went by me, into the bathroom, walking with urgent speed. I didn’t follow. I could hear her.
She must have looked at him for almost a minute. Then she said, “George.” And more sharply, “George!” After a short pause she said, her voice as brittle and fragile as late ice, “Oh my baby, baby, why won’t you talk to me, baby? What’s wrong?”
She came back into the bedroom. “He’s been working too hard. I knew it. I told him. He’s been working too hard. What did he try to do it with?”
“A razor blade.”
She sat in a chair as if her body was devoid of all energy. “I’ll call his brother. He owns a sanitarium not far from here. He’ll take care of George.”
“Is there anything I can do for you?”
She opened her eyes and breathed deeply. Her eyes showed no sign of approaching hysteria. There was iron in her system, a fine hard core beneath the flabbiness. “I’ll be all right. I was a nurse once. I know these things. I’ll be okay.”
She took the phone from the table beside the chair and placed her call. When she had hung up, she said, “Thank you for being here in time. What did you want to talk to George about?”
“It wasn’t important. I guess I’ll go now.”
“Before you go . . . I mean, I don’t want him to just sit in there. If . . .”
I nodded. I went into the bathroom and picked up Dr. Einhorn. He didn’t resist me. I carried him into the bedroom. His face still had that look of unspeakable grief. He made a small sound. I put him on the bed.
His wife pulled a chair close to the bed. She sat down near him. She had a Bible in one hand. She took one of his hands in her own. She opened the book, and began to read.
WHEN I GOT HOME I THOUGHT I WAS HUNGRY, SO I FIXED A sandwich and took a bottle of beer from the icebox. I went into the living room to eat, but after two bites I put the sandwich aside. There were too many knots in my stomach. I felt as if I had walked a long way down a far street and turned a corner, only to find myself again on the same long lonely street.
I must have dozed slightly, because the strident sound of the telephone alerted me with a cold drenching of fear. The feeling of dread persisted as I went to the telephone.
“Hello?”
“Bill? Phil Naar.” His voice sounded uncertain.
“Yeah?”
“I thought you’d want to know about this. I was over at the Highway Patrol when the call came in.” He spoke haltingly. “Some kids found a body in the woods about ten miles west of here. Shot twice.”
My mouth was dry. I had to lean against the table. I barely whispered. “Who, Phil?”
“Jimmy Herne’s cousin. The Francis girl. Looks like somebody murdered her.”
I shut my eyes. I had the precarious sensation of falling, emptily, through black space. “No,” I said. “No. No.”
“Bill—”
“I . . .”
“I thought you’d want to know.”
“Where are you?”
“I want to go there,” I said. “I’ll come by for you.”
“Bill—”
I hung up. I got my gun from the bedroom. I put it on. I remember thinking only one thing. Defiantly. It can’t be. It’s a mistake. I thought that. It was the only thing that kept me moving. Somebody’s made a mistake.