He ought to show the world one Enoch Winter, dead, along with one Kate Southerland alive. Winter had forced his way in, trying to attack her. Tell that story, and then let the good lawyers guide him through.
Quickly he closed his front door again, leaving it unlocked. His last look out into the lobby showed him the mirror with its draping raincoat. Show business, he thought.
Waving Kate to stand back, he retreated just a few steps from the door and drew the gun and thumbed the hammer back very silently. He raised it in a two-handed aim, keeping his gaze squarely on the door.
“What are you doing?” Kate’s voice was suddenly changed radically toward the normal, as if the sight of the drawn gun had acted as a tonic shock. “Craig!”
The doorbell chimed. Somehow, with the distraction from Kate, he had missed hearing the sounds of the elevator stopping and opening.
“Who?” he called out sharply. His hands, center-aiming at the door, were very steady.
“Winter,” the deep voice answered.
“No,” Kate whispered, somewhere behind him. “It isn’t. Be careful, don’t shoot.”
“Come in,” Walworth called, his trigger finger very slowly taking up slack. “It’s unlocked.”
The knob turned and the door swung in. Not Winter at all. Almost as tall, but lean. Under an open black topcoat, what looked like a new suit of expensive black. A somehow Christmasy red tie, a fine white shirt. Smiling, jaunty, vigorous, but obviously old.
The old man.
Walworth fired. Even though he knew, before the gun went off, exactly how much good the bullet was going to do him.
NINETEEN
Kate saw the old man step in through the front door, and in the same instant she heard the pistol fire. Only with that shock did her mind grow fully clear. If the old man had really needed help, she would have been too late to help him. As it was, she sprang forward with a speed and strength that she had not known she possessed, reaching past Craig’s shoulder to knock down his joined hands with the weapon still clasped in them. The force of the movement knocked Craig to his knees.
The old man smiled reassuringly at Kate. Then calmly bending with his own fluid and unhurried speed, he caught Craig by the shirt front and lifted him erect again, letting the gun stay somewhere on the floor. Reaching back with his free hand, Corday pushed the door shut behind him. Then he gently questioned both of the people with him: “Where is Joe?”
“He’s been here,” said Kate. “He’s not here now.”
Craig said: “I’m not gonna take any heat to protect her. Go over to Enchantress Cosmetics. As for Carol.”
“And what does Carol look like?” The question was in a tone of mild interest. Walworth’s strong, young body was swaying, and he seemed to be trying without success to avoid the old man’s eyes. The old man seemed to be keeping the young one propped up with one finger.
“Real good shape,” Walworth muttered. “Sharp dresser. Young. Red hair—”
“Ah? And where is the place you mentioned?”
Walworth named an intersection. “About eight blocks from here, west and south. I gotta warn you about her. She’s really got it in for you.”
“Indeed.”
“And for me too,” Walworth added hastily. “She wants me dead. Just today she drugged me—bad, man, bad. You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen. I thought you were a friend of hers just now, coming to finish me off. That’s why I . . .”
“Kate has told me,” the old man softly interrupted, “how and where she came to meet them. Johnny has spoken to me of a bearded man driving a car, who asked him for directions.”
Walworth’s hands that had aimed the gun so steadily were shaking now. He couldn’t seem to find anything to say.
Kate could only think of one thing clearly. “Please,” she broke in, talking to the old man. “I can help you now. I’m all right. Let’s go find Joe. He’s in real trouble.”
Still holding Walworth almost tenderly with one thin hand, the old man turned thoughtful eyes to Kate. “Go to the location this man has just given us,” he ordered. “I shall follow presently.” When Kate hesitated, he repeated firmly: “Go.”
Kate nodded, turned, and fled toward the kitchen. There was no sound of the back door being opened, but Walworth knew that she was gone.
He asked: “You gonna call in the cops on me?”
“No,” the old man assured him gently.
“You’re not really here anyway, are you?” Walworth asked him, shivering. “I could almost wish you were.”
* * *
At the mausoleum the old man had shown Kate something of how to use her recently acquired powers. How the night change in her body would enable her to pass like smoke through locked and bolted doors. The kitchen door went past her like some vague and insubstantial curtain, but this time she had hardly thought about the process. As she started down the back stairs of the apartment building, all her mental energies were concentrated on the job of finding Joe.
The back stairs were concrete and steel, designed as an interior fire escape as well as a service passage. Not until Kate had descended past two landings did she come to a small window. At once she used her marvelous new agility to leap up upon its narrow inside sill. Once she had located the knife-edge crevice where reinforced glass met metal frame, the closed window was no obstacle to her passage.
In the passing she willed an alteration in the cells of her body, the fabric of her clothes, the very air that filled her lungs and all the spaces in her bones. Outside, her altered body was at one with the wind. Her altered senses blurred. A creature of the air now, and no more solid than the air, she sank through clouds of falling snowflakes. Like blowing snow she skimmed above rooftops, down and up and down again.
Propelling herself by her will, she moved south, and west.
Joe was near.
His danger was terrible, but at least the threat did not seem to be immediate. And fortunately he had not yet been greatly hurt. Kate’s inner senses were keener now than before, but at the same time sight and hearing had grown blurred and dull and indirect with her physical body dispersed to hardly more than mist. She felt rather than saw the glowing streetlights and the bulking buildings of the city below, and anything dimmer or smaller could hardly be perceived at all. In order to reach Joe she was going to have to take on solid form again.
In theory, she knew, the forms of animals were available now for her to put on. But she had as yet tried nothing like that, and at the moment she had no mental energy or time to spare for experimentation. So when she came down with a crunch in rooftop snow, her shape was her own, as human as before. And as her senses grew keen again Kate was at once aware not only of the details of the buildings and the storm around her, but of two other forms that were passing as she had just passed in the air. They were the diffuse bodies of a man and a woman that Kate was almost sure she had never seen before.
Joe was very near, now, but not in the building where Kate had come down. She moved to crouch motionless beside a chimney, while the couple she had just detected materialized in a slow descent out of the beflaked air to another roof only half a block away. The building they came down on was no more than two or three stories high, of concrete gray.
* * *
In the little storeroom there were a couple of fifty-five-gallon steel drums, with clamped-on lids. There were wooden crates and cardboard boxes. It was too dark to see how any of them were labeled. Joe thought that if he could get to his feet he could make an effort to spill one or more of these containers on the chance that they might hold something helpful. A box of knives would seem to be unlikely. Maybe glass to break, to try to get an edge with
