I shut the car door again and crossed to the glass-paneled door. I went through into a small bare elevator lobby with a concrete floor and two blank elevator doors and beside them, opening on a heavy door closer, the fire stairs. I pulled that open and started up. I went slowly. Twelve stories and a basement take a lot of stairs. I counted the fire doors as I passed them because they were not numbered. They were heavy and solid and gray like the concrete of the steps. I was sweating and out of breath when I pulled open the door to the twelfth-floor corridor. I prowled along to Room 1224 and tried the knob. It was locked, but almost at once the door was opened, as if she had been waiting just behind it. I went in past her and flopped into a chair and waited to get some breath back. It was a big airy room with french windows opening on a balcony. The double bed had been slept in or arranged to look that way. Odds and ends of clothing on chairs, toilet articles on the dresser, luggage. It looked about twenty bucks a day, single.
She turned the night latch in the door. “Have any trouble?”
“The night man was junked to the eyes. Harmless as a kitten.” I heaved myself out of the chair and started across to the french doors.
“Wait!” she said sharply. I looked back at her. “It’s no use,” she said. “Nobody could do a thing like that.”
I stood there and waited.
“I’d rather call the police,” she said. “Whatever it means for me.”
“That’s a bright idea,” I said. “Why ever didn’t we think of it before?”
“You’d better leave,” she said. “There’s no need for you to be mixed up in it.”
I didn’t say anything. I watched her eyes. She could hardly keep them open. It was either delayed shock or some kind of dope. I didn’t know which.
“I swallowed two sleeping pills,” she said, reading my mind.
“I just can’t take any more trouble tonight. Go away from here. Please. When I wake I’ll call room service. When the waiter comes I’ll get him out on the balcony somehow and he’ll find—whatever he’ll find. And I won’t know a damn thing about it.” Her tongue was getting thick. She shook herself and rubbed hard against her temples. “I’m sorry about the money. You’ll have to give it back to me, won’t you?”
I went over close to her. “Because if I don’t you’ll tell them the whole story?”
“I’ll have to,” she said drowsily. “How can I help it?
They’ll get it out of me. I’m—I’m too tired to fight any more.”
I took hold of her arm and shook her. Her head wobbled.
“Quite sure you only took two capsules?”
She blinked her eyes open. “Yes. I never take more than two.”
“Then listen. I’m going out there and have a look at him. Then I’m going back to the Rancho. I’m going to keep your money. Also I have your gun. Maybe it can’t be traced to me but—Wake up! Listen to me!” Her head was rolling sideways again. She jerked straight and her eyes widened, but they looked dull and withdrawn. “Listen. If it can’t be traced to you, it certainly can’t be traced to me. I’m working for a lawyer and my assignment is you. The traveler’s checks and the gun will go right where they belong. And your story to the cops won’t be worth a wooden nickel. All it will do is help to hang you. Understand that?”
“Ye-es,” she said. “And I don’t g-give a damn.”
“That’s not you talking. It’s the sleeping medicine.”
She sagged forward and I caught her and steered her over to the bed. She flopped on it any old way. I pulled her shoes off and spread a blanket over her and tucked her in. She was asleep at once. She began to snore. I went into the bathroom and groped around and found a bottle of Nembutal on the shelf. It was almost full. It had a prescription number and a date on it. The date was a month old, the drugstore was in Baltimore. I dumped the yellow capsules out into my palm and counted them. There were forty-seven and they almost filled the bottle. When they take them to kill themselves, they take them all—except what they spill, and they nearly always spill some. I put the pills back in the bottle and put the bottle in my pocket.
I went back and looked at her again. The room was cold. I turned the radiator on, not too much. And finally at long last I opened the french doors and went out on the balcony. It was as cold as hell out there. The balcony was about twelve by fourteen feet, with a thirty-inch wall across the front and a low iron railing sprouting out of that. You could jump off easy enough, but you couldn’t possibly fall off accidentally. There were two aluminum patio chaises wilh padded cushions, two armchairs of the same type. The dividing wall to the left stuck out the way she had told me. I didn’t think even a steeplejack could get around the projection without climbing tackle. The wall at the other end rose sheer to the edge of what must be one of the penthouse terraces.
Nobody was dead on either of the chaises, nor on the floor of the balcony, nor anywhere at all. I examined them for traces of blood. No blood. No blood on the balcony. I went along the safety wall. No blood. No signs of anything having been heaved over. I stood against the wall and held on to the metal railing and leaned out as far as I could lean. I looked straight down the face of the wall to the ground. Shrubs grew close to it, then a narrow strip of lawn, then a flagstone footpath, then another strip of lawn and then a heavy fence with more shrubs growing against that. I estimated the distance. At that height it wasn’t easy, but it must have been at least thirty-five feet. Beyond the fence the sea creamed on some half-submerged rocks.
Larry Mitchell was about half an inch taller than I was but weighed about fifteen pounds less, at a rough guess. The man wasn’t born who could heave a hundred and seventy-five pound body over that railing and far enough out to fall into the ocean. It was barely possible that a girl wouldn’t realize that, just barely possible, about one tenth of one per cent possible.
I opened the french door and went through and shut it and crossed to stand beside the bed. She was still sound asleep. She was still snoring. I touched her cheek with the back of my hand. It was moist. She moved a little and mumbled. Then she sighed and settled her head into the pillow. No stertorous breathing, no deep stupor, no coma, and therefore no overdose.
She had told me the truth about one thing, and about damned little else.
I found her bag in the top drawer of the dresser. It had a zipper pocket at the back. I put her folder of traveler’s checks in it and looked through it for information. There was some crisp folding money in the zipper pocket, a Santa Fe timetable, the folder her ticket had been in and the stub of the railroad ticket and the Pullman reservation. She had had Bedroom E on Car 19, Washington, D.C., to San Diego, California. No letters, nothing to identify her. That
