'I told Talia that one reason I had to leave right away was to put out word that the envelope was worthless if opened,' I said, thinking back over the sequence of events.
'Then that will do it, since you also said you had to shake a tail en route here,' Erikson said. 'You can tell Talia's boss you had to put a 'hold' on anyone thinking of opening the envelope, and the tail will confirm your maneuvering.'
'I
McLaren handed me the repacked envelope, still handling it via the tweezers. He was smiling as if he had heard Erikson's brand of persuasion before.
Their attitude irritated me.
If I couldn't get a shot at recovering Hazel's money, the rest of this jazz meant nothing to me.
I decided I'd take an hour from my sleeping time to line up a speech giving Erikson the word that I'd abdicated.
But I didn't get any sleep that night.
I entered Chryssie's tenement with my mind still on Karl Erikson and Jock McLaren and their calm assumption that I would let myself be talked into doing their bidding.
I found myself in front of Chryssie's door, key in hand, staring at the door standing ajar with its lock shattered.
I think I knew what I was going to find inside.
I drew my.38 before kicking the door wide open to make sure no one was hiding behind it. There was no sound except the dull thud of the door against the wall. The living room was empty. I made a quick tour of possible hiding places before I went into the bedroom.
It was far worse than I expected.
The bloody thing was spread-eagled to the four corners of the bed by gray clothesline-cord on wrists and ankles, the wide-staring blue eyes fixed on infinity.
Chryssie was dead.
Almost unrecognizably dead.
I tried to tell myself that the pimp had come back and that this was his revenge for loss of face, but I knew better. A pimp doesn't carve up a girl with a knife until he's finished with her, not when he's trying to recruit her.
No, it wasn't the pimp.
It was me.
Despite my precautions, I'd let someone tail me from Talia's apartment. When I'd eventually double-doored him in the subway, he'd come back, and with his knife, tried to find out from Chryssie where I'd gone. Or if I'd said anything significant to her about recovering the envelope.
I could only stand there and hope that she'd been on a marijuana-high and hadn't known too much about what was being done to her. But looking at the mutilated girl-body, it was a forlorn hope.
Sure, the girl had been a loser.
She'd had no hold on life at all.
She'd been a natural victim, her bizarre manner of living almost a guarantee of some such departure.
But it had been me who had unwittingly stage-managed the gruesomely macabre finale. I'd involved myself with the girl because of her age. Involved myself in a half-hearted salvage attempt, yet I hadn't hesitated to use her for cover at the Alhambra.
Now there was this savage finale.
There was one small consolation.
After his failure to obtain information from Chryssie, the knife artist would station himself outside to await my return. He might report his temporary failure or he might not, but he'd be waiting. He'd be outside now to pick up my tail again when I left the tenement. If I didn't come out, his curiosity-and his orders-would bring him back upstairs to find out why.
So I waited for him.
I employed the next twenty minutes wiping my prints from every possible object I might have touched in the flat. And I made one other preparation. I wrestled open the usually-closed window overlooking the alley below, the alley-window I'd noticed the first night I'd accompanied Chryssie home. Then I stationed myself in a corner of the room, keeping an ear cocked for sounds from the creaking stairway, the only access to the flat.
When I finally heard the sounds, I was ready.
The knife-artist sidled through the partly opened door at a fast glide, curved knife-blade in hand. He was small, furtive, and foreign-looking. 'Inside,' I said to him from the corner of the room where I was standing.
He whirled, raised his arm to throw the knife, saw my.38 lined up on his head, and changed his mind. 'Inside,' I repeated, and motioned toward the bedroom in case he didn't speak English. He started toward it slowly, trying to watch me as I closed in behind him, gun at the ready. He didn't have a chance. I slammed the.38 against the base of his neck, and he pitched forward on his face.
I dragged the unconscious figure into the bedroom and over to the opened window. I boosted him up and part way through it, turning him so that his upper body was outside the window and he was hanging by the hinges of his knees with only my weight on his legs to keep him from plunging down into the alley below.
Then I waited.
I wanted him conscious before I turned him loose.
The rush of blood to his dangling head brought expected tremors as he regained consciousness. He started to struggle, then became rigid as his expanding awareness brought recognition of his situation. 'Who sent you?' I said to him.
Silence.
I hadn't expected anything different. Even if he understood English, I hadn't expected anything different. There hadn't been an amateur connected with the operation yet. I watched the mouth of the alley until a wide- spaced set of headlights turned into its narrow passageway. A diesel snorted as the truck picked up speed.
I gauged the distance, then pushed at the legs I'd been holding.
Professional to the core, he went silently.
I heard the sound as he hit, the quick blare of a horn, and then another sound.
I closed the window and wiped my prints from it.
I went to the telephone, looked up the number on the scrap of paper I'd left in the night-table drawer, and dialed. 'Yes?' a sleepy, Main Line-accented voice said after an interval. 'Who's calling at this hour of the night?'
'Come and get your daughter, Mr. Rouse.'
There was an instant during which the only sound was the faint humming of the phone receiver in my ear.
'She's-Cornelia is-' He couldn't complete it.
'Yes, she is.'
I hung up the phone, wiped my prints from it, left the building, and headed uptown toward Talia's apartment.
I felt a sudden urgency about meeting Talia's boss.
He might not have wielded the knife, but he was the man responsible for Chryssie's death.
I didn't look for a cab.
I still had steam coming out my ears over what had happened to Chryssie, and I had to get myself in a sweeter frame of mind before I went up against Talia again to con her, so I walked.
The night doorman in the East Sixty-third-Street apartment building eyed me dubiously when I told him I was calling on Miss Talia Rhazmet. He looked at his watch and again at me. Finally he directed me to the house phone but kept an eye on me while I placed the call. 'It's me,' I said when Talia's drowsy voice came on the line. 'I've got good news for you.'
Her voice came alive. 'You have? Wonderful! Where are you?'
