second door on the left, all right, and the door was open on the chain latch a conservative three-quarters of an inch. Through the narrow opening he could get an impression only of dark hair; he noticed that there were two chains on the door-one below the other, one dull and tarnished, one shiny and new. He wondered when Roberta Perry had put on the new chain.
“I don't know you,” the voice said positively.
“We can fix that,” Johnny suggested. “The password is Ellen.”
There was a little silence. “What about Ellen?”
“Listen, Bobby,” he said rapidly. “We can't talk like this. Go in and call Lorraine Barnes and tell her a guy named Killain's on your doorstep. Ask her to describe me, and ask her anything else you want. Then let's see if we can't talk.”
“I don't have time.” Indecision had crept into the voice, though. “I have an appointment… You know Lorraine Barnes?”
“Call her. Then give me five minutes.”
“Well-” Curiosity struggled with doubt. “I'll be right back.”
He retreated the width of the corridor, where he braced himself with a bent knee and a heel on the wall behind him and lit a cigarette. He savored the smoke and looked appraisingly up and down the dingy hall. He wondered about a girl like Roberta Perry living in a place like this-not that he'd ever seen her, but her job must pay pretty for money…
She was back at the door. “She doesn't answer. She's not at the office, either; I tried there, too.” The doubt had returned to the voice, intensified.
Johnny moved quickly away from the supporting wall. “Look, what do I have to do? This is important. Lorraine's about forty, dark hair going gray, blue-gray eyes, a little heavy in the superstructure, good legs. Her husband Vic's short and stocky, high color, thin hair combed-”
“Come on in.” He could hear the chains rattling, and she opened the door. Inside, he nodded at the linked metal.
“How come the armor plate?”
“It's that kind of neighborhood, mister.” The reply was pert, and so was Bobby Perry, Johnny decided. She was a short girl, tending to plumpness. The features were good, and the coloration, but the small mouth was petulant, and the chin dropped away fast. She wasn't unattractive, though; the dark hair was cut in a short bob that managed to fluff out wildly all around her head. Her movements were quick; she looked like the type of girl the boys would flock around at a party.
She led the way into her living room, sparsely furnished with mismatched pieces. She turned to wave him to a chair and caught his look. “Sit down. Don't let the props depress you. I have other uses for my money.”
“Like clothes?” he suggested, eyeing her. Her dress was not off a rack, and it did something for her. With her soft-bodied fullness of figure she needed something done for her.
“If that's a compliment I accept it.” She smiled as she looked him up and down. “No shortage of material when they had you on the ways, huh?” The smile died, and she looked at the watch on her wrist. “So what's important? You've got to make this quick. I left the office to keep this appointment. You can sit right over there, Mr.-”
“Killain,” he supplied again. He walked to the indicated chair, a huge, high-backed, overstuffed relic of an earlier day. It was placed with its back to the large window through which the sun slanted obliquely, and in the instant before he seated himself Johnny had a quick impression of surrounding tenements, flapping clotheslines and rusting fire escapes. He settled back in the sunken depths of the old chair and decided that Roberta Perry had legs a notch or two above the utilitarian class. “I used to be married to Ellen Saxon, Bobby.”
It surprised her. She stared at him, adjusting her ideas of him. He could see that she was not sure she approved of the situation. “How long ago?”
“Five, six years.”
“Oh. Well?”
“You worked with her. Anyone on her back?”
He could see her relax. “I'm a mercenary soul, Mr. Killain. What's in it for me? And now that I think of it, what's in it for you? Better give me the big picture.”
“I'll give it to you quick. I want to find him.”
“You're the neanderthalic type? It's uneconomic.” She bit her lip thoughtfully. “Can I offer you a beer?”
He was surprised. “Sure-”
She was looking at her watch again. “One quick one.” She rose from her chair and half turned to the glassed- in china closet behind her, then turned back to him. The plump features were serious. “This noncommercial kick you're on- it's permanent?”
He studied her. “You got something to sell?”
“I didn't say that.” She opened the door of the china closet and removed a thick-glassed stein. She pointed it at him. “But if I did have, do-” Her voice trailed off in a ragged gasp, and then she screamed piercingly. She drew back her arm as if to throw the glass, and he ducked instinctively since she was looking right at him. Then the world blew up behind him.
Sharp, repeated sound filled his ears, and the glass doors of the china closet dissolved shatteringly behind Roberta Perry. Her scream flatted out gratingly as she was smashed back into the debris, where she was pinned helplessly an instant before she slid slack-kneed to the floor in another welter of crashing crystalware.
On hands and knees Johnny reached her side, but the first look was enough-the recently admired dress was now torn, stained, and ugly.
In a scrambling, crablike scuttle he got back to the window behind his chair. The large lower pane was completely gone, blown into the room by the bullets fired from the fire escape beyond. He looked out and down cautiously and saw the final hinged portion of the rusted metal which hung suspended ten feet above the alley bed below swinging lightly to and fro from the released weight of the departed caller.
He came back into the room, looked down once more at the body of Roberta Perry and picked up the telephone as he heard the first hurrying footsteps out in the hall.
CHAPTER 8
Johnny lay flat on his back on the sofa in Vic's living room, his shoeless feet dangling over the sofa arm at one end and a pillow beneath his head. His brightly flowered sport shirt hung carelessly from the back of a nearby chair, and a bourbon highball rested on his undershirted stomach. In the apartment's sticky heat Lorraine Barnes sat in the armchair opposite him with her bare feet neatly drawn up beneath her. A duplicate highball rested on the table beside her chair, and she listened with head thrown back and eyes closed to the rumble of Johnny's recital.
“-pinwheels went off all over that place when they got there and found me in residence. Cuneo especially was so mad he couldn't make sense; he didn't want to believe my story even when the lab boys supported it by findin' the scuffed-up rust on the fire escape and the ejected shell cases in the alley below. Then it turned out that a couple or three people in the neighborhood had actually seen the guy gettin' down the fire escape. Even had descriptions. 'Course the descriptions don't tally-they never do at a time like that-but the consensus seemed to favor a stocky guy in gray trousers, a cap and a loud checked jacket. The police-”
Lorraine Barqes opened her eyes, which looked darker than normal in the pallor of her face. “A loud checked jacket?” she interrupted. “And a cap? In all this heat? Do you go to commit a murder in an outfit like that?”
“You think he was tryin' to look like someone else?”
“Certainly trying not to look like himself. I wouldn't give that description houseroom.” She sighed and passed a hand over her eyes, then twisted in her chair to try for a more comfortable position. “If this heat would only let up I might be able to think.” Her voice was husky; she smiled wanly. “I'm beat, I admit it. Right down to my socks, if I were wearing any.”
“They gave you a hard time?”
“Oh, not by their lights, I suppose. When Rogers got here he had just two questions-had I been here, or where had I been, and did I have any witnesses? When I had no alibi for the time Bobby was killed I received the
