my wallet. I went back to the man with the white coat. He had too much money for his job. I took what I had started with and heaved him on to the bed and strapped him wrist and ankle and stuffed half a yard of sheet into his mouth. He had a smashed nose. I waited long enough to make sure he could breathe through it.
I was sorry for him. A simple hardworking little guy trying to hold his job down and get his weekly pay check. Maybe with a wife and kids. Too bad. And all he had to help him was a sap. It didn’t seem fair. I put the doped whiskey down where he could reach it, if his hands hadn’t been strapped.
I patted his shoulder. I almost cried over him.
All my clothes, even my gun harness and gun, but no shells in the gun, hung in the closet. I dressed with fumbling fingers, yawning a great deal.
The man on the bed rested. I left him there and locked him in.
Outside was a wide silent hallway with three closed doors. No sounds came from behind any of them. A wine-colored carpet crept down the middle and was as silent as the rest of the house. At the end there was a jog in the hall and then another hall at right angles and the head of a big old-fashioned staircase with white oak bannisters. It curved graciously down into the dim hall below. Two stained glass inner doors ended the lower hall. It was tessellated and thick rugs lay on it. A crack of light seeped past the edge of an almost closed door. But no sound at all.
An old house, built as once they built them and don’t build them any more. Standing probably on a quiet street with a rose arbor at the side and plenty of flowers in front. Gracious and cool and quiet in the bright California sun. And inside it who cares, but don’t let them scream too loud.
I had my foot out to go down the stairs when I heard a man cough. That jerked me around and I saw there was a half open door along the other hallway at the end. I tip-toed along the runner. I waited, close to the partly open door, but not in it. A wedge of light lay at my feet on the carpet. The man coughed again. It was a deep cough, from a deep chest. It sounded peaceful and at ease. It was none of my business. My business was to get out of there. But any man whose door could be open in that house interested me. He would be a man of position, worth tipping your hat to. I sneaked a little into the wedge of light. A newspaper rustled.
I could see part of a room and it was furnished like a room, not like a cell. There was a dark bureau with a hat on it and some magazines. Windows with lace curtains, a good carpet.
Bed springs creaked heavily. A big guy, like his cough. I reached out fingertips and pushed the door an inch or two. Nothing happened. Nothing ever was slower than my head craning in. I saw the room now, the bed, and the man on it, the ashtray heaped with stubs that overflowed on to a night table and from that to the carpet. A dozen mangled newspapers all over the bed. One of them in a pair of huge hands before a huge face. I saw the hair above the edge of the green paper. Dark, curly — black even — and plenty of It. A line of white skin under it. The paper moved a little more and I didn’t breathe and the man on the bed didn’t look up.
He needed a shave. He would always need a shave. I had seen him before, over on Central Avenue, in a Negro dive called Florian’s. I had seen him in a loud suit with white golf balls on the coat and a whiskey sour in his hand. And had seen him with an Army Colt looking like a toy in his fist, stepping softly through a broken door. I had seen some of his work and it was the kind of work that stays done.
He coughed again and rolled his buttocks on the bed and yawned bitterly and reached sideways for a frayed pack of cigarettes on the night table. One of them went into his mouth. Light flared at the end of his thumb. Smoke came out of his nose.
“Ah,” he said, and the paper went up in front of his face again.
I left him there and went back along the side hall. Mr. Moose Malloy seemed to be in very good hands. I went back to the stairs and down.
A voice murmured behind the almost closed door. I waited for the answering voice. None. It was a telephone conversation. I went over close to the door and listened. It was a low voice, a mere murmur. Nothing carried that meant anything. There was finally a dry clicking sound. Silence continued inside the room after that.
This was the time to leave, to go far away. So I pushed the door open and stepped quietly in.
27
It was an office, not small, not large, with a neat professional look. A glass-doored bookcase with heavy books inside. A first aid cabinet on the wall. A white enamel and glass sterilizing cabinet with a lot of hypodermic needles and syringes inside it being cooked. A wide flat desk with a blotter on it, a bronze paper cutter, a pen set, an appointment book, very little else, except the elbows of a man who sat brooding, with his face in his hands.
Between the spread yellow fingers I saw hair the color of wet brown sand, so smooth that it appeared to be painted on his skull. I took three more steps and his eyes must have looked beyond the desk and seen my shoes move. His head came up and he looked at me. Sunken colorless eyes in a parchment-like face. He unclasped his hands and leaned back slowly and looked at me with no expression at all.
Then he spread his hands with a sort of helpless but disapproving gesture and when they came to rest again, one of them was very close to the corner of the desk.
I took two steps more and showed him the blackjack. His index and second finger still moved towards the corner of the desk.
“The buzzer,” I said, “won’t buy you anything tonight. I put your tough boy to sleep.”
His eyes got sleepy. “You have been a very sick man, air. A very sick man. I can’t recommend your being up and about yet.”
I said: “The right hand.” I snapped the blackjack at it. It coiled into itself like a wounded snake.
I went around the desk grinning without there being anything to grin at. He had a gun in the drawer of course. They always have a gun in the drawer and they always get it too late, if they get it at all. I took it out. It was a .38 automatic, a standard model not as good as mine, but I could use its ammunition. There didn’t seem to be any in the drawer. I started to break the magazine out of his.
He moved vaguely, his eyes still sunken and sad.
“Maybe you’ve got another buzzer under the carpet,” I said. “Maybe it rings in the Chief’s office down at headquarters. Don’t use it. Just for an hour I’m a very tough guy. Anybody comes in that door is walking into a coffin.”
“There is no buzzer under the carpet,” he said. His voice had the slightest possible foreign accent.
I got his magazine out and my empty one and changed them. I ejected the shell that was in the chamber of his gun and let it lie. I jacked one up into the chamber of mine and went back to the other side of the desk again.
There was a spring lock on the door. I backed towards it and pushed it shut and heard the lock click. There was also a bolt. I turned that.
I went back to the desk and sat in a chair. It took my last ounce of strength.
“Whiskey,” I said.
He began to move his hands around.
“Whiskey,” I said.
He went to the medicine cabinet and got a flat bottle with a green revenue stamp on it and a glass.
“Two glasses,” I said. “I tried your whiskey once. I damn near hit Catalina Island with it.”
He brought two small glasses and broke the seal and filled the two glasses.
“You first,” I said.
He smiled faintly and raised one of the glasses.
“Your health, sir — what remains of it.” He drank. I drank. I reached for the bottle and stood it near me and waited for the heat to get to my heart. My heart began to pound, but it was back up in my chest again, not hanging on a shoelace.
“I had a nightmare,” I said. “Silly idea. I dreamed I was tied to a cot and shot full of dope and locked in a barred room. I got very weak. I slept. I had no food. I was a sick man. I was knocked on the head and brought into a place where they did that to me. They took a lot of trouble. I’m not that important.”
He said nothing. He watched me. There was a remote speculation in his eyes, as if he wondered how long I
