It was 9: 50 when the cab pulled up in front of Powell's house. West 35th Street was silent, feebly lighted by streetlamps whose beams had to strain their way through meshing tree branches. Yellow windowed houses faced each other on either side, like timid armies showing flags across no-man's-land.
As the roar of the departing cab faded away, Ellen and Powell mounted the steps of a dark, creaking-floored porch. After a few unsuccessful stabs for the keyhole, Powell unlocked the door and pushed it open. He stepped aside and followed Ellen in, throwing the door closed with one hand and flicking a light switch with the other.
They were in a pleasant-looking living room full of fat chintz-and-maple furniture. 'You'd better stay down here,' Powell said, going towards a staircase at the left side of the room. 'Everything's in a mess upstairs. My landlady is in the hospital and I wasn't expecting company.' He paused on the first step. 'It'll probably take me a few minutes to find that book. There's some instant coffee in the kitchen back there. You want to fix some?'
'All right,' Ellen said, slipping out of her coat Powell jogged up the stairs and swung around the newel post. The door to his room was, opposite the side of the stairwell. He went in, flipping on the light, and shucked off his coat. The unmade bed, on the right against the windows, was littered with pajamas and discarded clothes. He tossed his coat on top of the whole business and squatted down, about to pull a suitcase from under the bed; but with a sharp fingersnap he straightened up, turned, and stepped over to the bureau, which stood squeezed between a closet door and an armchair. He opened the top drawer and rummaged through papers and small boxes and scarves and broken cigarette lighters. He found the paper he wanted at the bottom of the drawer. Pulling it free with a flourish, he went into the hall and leaned over the stairwell bannister. 'Ellen!' he called.
In the kitchen, Ellen adjusted the sighing gas flame under a pan of water. 'Coming!' she answered. She hurried through the dining room and into the living room. 'Got it already?' she asked, going to the stairs and looking up.
Powell's head and shoulders jutted into the stairwell. 'Not yet,' he said. 'But I thought you'd like to see this.' He let go of a stiff sheet of paper that came side-slipping down. 'Just in case you have any lingering doubts.'
It landed on the stairs before her. Picking it up, she saw that it was a photostat of his NYU record, the words Student Copy stamped on it. 'If I had any lingering doubts,' she said, 'I wouldn't be here, would I?'
'True,' Powell said, 'true,'-and vanished from the stairwell.
Ellen took another look at the transcript and noted that his marks had indeed been pretty poor. Putting the paper on a table, she returned through the dining room to the kitchen. It was a depressing room with old-fashioned appliances and cream colored walls that were brown in the corners and behind the stove. There was, however, a pleasant breeze blowing through from the back.
She found cups and saucers and a can of Nescafe in the various cupboards, and while she was spooning the powder into the cups, she noticed a radio with a cracked plastic case on the counter next to the stove. She turned it on, and once it had warmed up, slowly twisted the selector knob until she found KBRI. She almost passed over it because the small celluloid-vibrating set made Gant's voice sound unfamiliarly thin. '... and a little too much about things political,' he was saying, 'so let's get back to music. We've just got time for one more record, and it's the late Buddy Clark singing If This Isn't Love.'
Powell, having dropped the transcript down to Ellen, turned around and went back into his room. Squatting before the bed, he shot his hand underneath it-to bang his fingertips painfully against the suitcase, which had been pulled forward from its usual position flush against the wall. He jerked his hand out, waggling the fingers and blowing on them, and cursing his landlady's daughter-in-law who apparently had not been satisfied with only secreting his shoes beneath the bureau.
He reached under the bed again, more cautiously this time, and dragged the heavy-as-lead suitcase all the way out into the open. He took a bunch of keys from his pocket, found the right one and twisted it in the two locks springing them. Replacing the keys, he lifted the lid. The suitcase was filled with textbooks, a tennis racket, a bottle of Canadian Club, golf shoes... He took out the larger items and put them on the floor so that it would be easier to get at the notebooks underneath.
There were nine of them; pale green, spiral-bound notebooks. He gathered them into a bundle, stood up with the bundle in his arm and began inspecting them one at a time; examining both covers, dropping the books one by one back into the suitcase.
It was on the seventh one, on the back cover. The penciled address was rubbed and smudged, but it was still legible. He dropped the other two notebooks into the suitcase and turned around, his mouth opening to form Ellen's name in a triumphant shout.
The shout didn't come through. The exultant expression clung to his face for a moment, like a stopped movie, and then it cracked and slid slowly away, like thick snow cracking and sliding from a canted roof.
The closet door was open and a man in a trench-coat stood framed there. He was tall and blond, and a gun bulked large in his gloved right hand.
He was sweating. Not cold sweat though; hot healthy sweat from standing in the sweatbox of an airless closet in the sweatsuit of an imporous trench-coat. His hands too; the gloves were brown leather with a fuzzy lining and elastic cuffs that held in the heat even more; his hands were sweating so much that the fuzzy lining was sodden and caked.
But the automatic (weightless now like part of him after dragging heavily in his pocket all evening) was motionless; the inevitable trajectory of the bullet as palpable in the air as a dotted line in a diagram. Point A: the rock-steady muzzle; Point B: the heart under the lapel of the cheesy-looking probably-bought-in-Iowa suit. He looked down at the Colt .45 as though to verify its blue steel existence, so light it was, and then he took a step forward from the mouth of the closet, reducing by a foot the length of dotted line AB. Well say something, he thought, enjoying the slow stupid melting of Mister Dwight Powell's face. Start talking. Start pleading. Probably can't Probably he's all talked out after the-what's that word?-the logorrhea of the cocktail lounge. Good word.
'I bet you don't know what logorrhea means,' he said, standing there powerfully with the gun in his hand.
Powell stared at the gun. 'You're the one... with Dorothy,' he said.
'It means what you've got. Diarrea of the mouth. Words keep running. I thought my ear would fall off in that cocktail lounge.' He smiled at Powell's widening eyes. 'I was responsible for poor Dorothy's death,' he mimicked. 'A pity. A real pity.' He stepped closer. 'The notebook, por favor,' he said, extending his left hand. 'And don't try anything.'
From downstairs, singing came softly:
If this isn't love,
Then winter is summer...
He took the notebook that Powell held out, dropped back a step and pressed it against his side, bending it in half lengthwise, cracking the cover, never taking his eyes or the gun off Powell. 'I'm awfully sorry you found this. I was standing in there hoping you wouldn't.' He stuck the folded notebook into his coat pocket.
'You really killed her...' Powell said.
'Let's keep the voices low.' He moved the gun admonishingly. 'We don't want to disturb the girl detective, do we?' It annoyed him the way Mister Dwight Powell was standing there so blankly. Maybe he was too stupid to realize.,. 'Maybe you don't realize it, but this is a real gun, and it's loaded.'
Powell didn't say anything. He just went on looking at the gun, not even staring now,-just looking at it with mildly distasteful interest, as though it were the first ladybug of the year.
'Look, I'm going to kill you.'
Powell didn't say anything.
'You're such a great one for analyzing yourself- tell me, how do you feel now? I bet your knees are shaking, aren't they? Cold sweat all over you?'
Powell said, 'She thought she was going there to get married...'
'Forget about her! You've got yourself to worry about' Why wasn't he trembling? Didn't he have brains enough...?
'Why did you kill her?' Powell's eyes finally lifted from the gun. 'If you didn't want to marry her, you could have left her. That would have been better than. killing her.'
'Shut up about her! What's the matter with you? You think I'm bluffing? Is that it? You think-'
Powell leaped forward.
Before he had gone six inches a loud explosion roared; dotted line AB was solidified and fulfilled by tearing lead.
