five years older than Johnny's thirty-five; his hair was dark and slicked down closely to a small skull. He had a stolid, unimaginative face, but a firm mouth and chin; Paul was reliable. “I want you to cover for me,” Johnny explained. “I need to run upstairs a few minutes.”
“So go ahead,” Paul said at once, folding up his paper. “Vic'll be back in a minute. I'm not likely to get any conventions to check in till he gets here.”
“It's quiet enough,” Johnny agreed. “Okay. If you need me ring 629. It's not on the board.”
Paul nodded. As he turned away from the desk Johnny reflected that one of Paul's primary virtues was that he needed no diagrams.
Johnny stepped out into the sixth-floor corridor after anchoring the cab of the service elevator with a slab of wood, and a flash of white at the end of the hall caught his eye. He looked more closely and discovered a white kitten galloping in spurting dashes, twin white paws batting at a dustball. “What the hell?” Johnny was surprised to find that he had said it aloud. There couldn't be two white kittens in this place. Not on the sixth floor, anyway. This kitten should have been behind the door of 629, and since it wasn't something was wrong.
He advanced on the kitten, which wheeled to confront him. When Johnny was half a dozen paces away the small back arched slowly, and the white fur seemed to swell enormously, especially around the neck. A long, surprisingly loud hiss accompanied this display of defiance, and Johnny laughed as he dropped to his knees. “You need a new matchmaker, white stuff; you're givin' away too much weight.” He extended a finger, slowly and steadily, and the kitten watched its approach, eyes of an unexpectedly bright blue fearlessly studying the problem. Johnny ran the finger right up to the ridiculous whiskers, and in movement too quick to follow the kitten turned its head and seized the finger in its mouth.
It was not a bite; Johnny could feel the impression of the needle-like little fangs, but he knew it was just a holding action while the kitten debated the seriousness of the assault. With his left hand he scooped up the small body, and the fangs closed down. Johnny stood up and worked his finger free, and he and Sassy looked down at the two bright drops of blood which dotted its surface. “Okay, tiger; you won a battle, but you lost the war. It's happened to heavyweights. Now let's go see how you got out here.”
With the kitten riding his arm he turned back down the corridor to 629. He could see that the door was tightly closed as he approached it, and his feeling of unease increased. He couldn't imagine Ellen Saxon opening the door of that room to anyone in the mood in which he had left her, yet somehow the kitten had gotten out into the hall.
At the door he fumbled for his pass key. Then the door opened inward suddenly as he reached for the lock, and Vic Barnes stood teetering on the threshold, breast-to-breast with Johnny.
Vic's face was ghastly, perspiration streamed down the faded, round cheeks, and the eyes were all whites. Vic's mouth opened convulsively, but no sound emerged; he half turned to look back over his shoulder, and rubberlegged a sideways step as Johnny impatiently pushed past him and inside.
A stride beyond the door he stopped in his tracks.
Ellen Saxon lay on the bed where he had left her; for a long moment Johnny stared in disbelief at the twisted limbs, the outflung arm with which she had sought in vain to protect herself, the so-well-remembered face that was now a death mask of horror. A puffed, blue, strangulated horror.
He drew a harsh breath and crossed the room in a lunge. He felt for a pulse and dropped the limp wrist hopelessly. There was no pulse. Ellen-he still couldn't believe it.
He fought his way back up to the surface; he couldn't seem to get off dead center mentally. He forced himself to lean forward and look more closely at Ellen's outthrust arm and hand; he avoided looking at her face. When he turned to Vic he didn't recognize his own voice. “What were you doing up here, Vic?”
Vic never even heard him. The stocky man had dropped down on a chair just inside the door and had retreated to a private world of his own. He was bent nearly double in the chair, with the lower half of his face cradled in his hands and the protruding eyes staring glassily.
Johnny stepped into the bathroom and turned on the cold water. He grabbed a towel from the rack, soaked it in the running water, wrung it out hard, folded it three times lengthwise and brought it out and handed it to Vic, who plunged his face into it. Johnny was already making the round trip to wet down another towel; by the third trip Vic was back on his feet and Johnny had a hand on his shoulder. “Why did you come up here, Vic?”
The waxen-faced man swallowed hard. A hand crept up and removed his glasses, absently stuffing them into the breast pocket of his jacket. He had trouble finding his voice; it seemed to come from a long distance. “I–I can't tell you.”
“What the hell do you mean you can't tell me!” Johnny rapped back at him. Without the glasses the deathly pale features looked more defenseless than before. He looked at the water marks from the wet towels on the shoulders of the black alpaca jacket, and he tried to keep his voice down. “Look, Vic; this is Johnny. I don't think you did it. I know you better than that. I know you didn't do it, but I also need to know a few other things. Why did you come up here?”
Vic stared at him dumbly.
Johnny fought for patience. “How much time you think we got, Vic? This is important. I've worked with you for seven years. Fifty times I've asked you to block out a room for me. This is the first time you ever came upstairs. Why?”
The stocky man's voice was a leaden monotone. “The p-police will say I did it.”
It brought Johnny up short. They would, too, if Vic didn't make any more sense than he had up to now. If they don't think you did it, he added silently to himself. He had to find out what Vic knew before the police got there, or he wasn't going to find out anything at all.
He pushed Vic back down into the chair again, and the spaniel eyes stared up at him. “Are you listening, Vic? Do you hear me?”
A nod, and again the hard swallowing movement of the throat.
“The police are going to ask you the same thing I did, Vic.” Johnny leaned over him. “What are you going to tell them?”
Silence. And then Vic's head came up, and a fleeting impression of an expression passed over the damp, ashen face. “I'll tell them-” He hesitated, and his voice strengthened a little with the necessity for conveying his thought. “I'll tell them I-had a date with her. Yes. Date with her… that's it.”
Johnny restrained a wild desire to laugh. “Date with her? You? For God's sake, Vic-”
But Vic had gone away again. With the head bowed the slack-lipped mumble was scarcely understandable. “-date with her.”
Johnny's nails bit into his palms. Time. No time. No time for this damned foolishness. Somewhere inside him a spring was winding down, tighter and tighter. He leaned forward again. “Vic!” He tried to put his own desperate sense of urgency into his voice. “You know they're gonna take you in if you tell them that?” He stared down at Vic's bowed head; he wasn't getting through. He aimed his hard voice down at the withdrawn man. “Do you know who she was, Vic?”
And Vic's head came up; again the voice was a little stronger. “Yes. Ellen Saxon.”
Johnny felt winded, suspended in space and time. How did Vic know Ellen Saxon? How had he known she was here in this room? How did- He shook his head. No time. No time at all. He tried to capitalize on the breakthrough. “Vic. Look at me. Did you know that Ellen Saxon had been married to me?”
The whites overran Vic's eyes. “Mar-ried?” The halting voice made two distinct syllables of the one word; before Johnny's eyes the bones of the round face seemed to dissolve, and the facial flesh slackened. The stocky man pitched sideways from his chair, and Johnny had to lunge hard to catch him before he hit the floor.
The jolting grab as his arms absorbed Vic's weight released Johnny from his own inertia. He lifted strongly, settling Vic back in the chair and propping him up. He glanced quickly around the room; he had a lot to do, and he wasn't thinking clearly.
He grabbed up his torn uniform jacket from the floor, the jacket he had thrown over Ellen's shoulders out in the street in that short time ago that now seemed like such a long time ago. He scooped up the wet towels, and looked for the kitten. He picked up the small white body from the floor where it was playing with the tassels on the bedspread and tucked it under his arm.
In the corridor a dozen strides took him to the door of 615, his own room. He opened it, dropped jacket, towels, and kitten inside, and closed and locked it. Back at the door of 629 he saw that Vic was again in the land of the living, and his voice was hard. “On your feet, Vic. Got to get out of here.”
