In the pitch darkness at the head of the stairs, a man crouched, watching her. He shifted the. 38 Colt automatic to his left hand, wiped his sweating right palm against his overcoat and renewed his grip on the butt. He sucked his bottom lip and waited.
Leila found the right key and got the door open. She returned the keys to her pocket and groped for the light switch on the wall to the right. Her gloved fingers touched it; she pushed the button, but no lights came on.
“Oh, damn!” she said in a tremulous voice that she had tried vainly to make sound annoyed.
She turned, locked the door behind her and began ascending the stairs. Her body was trembling from head to foot, and she had to force her reluctant feet to make each step.
A strong, nerve-tingling, aphrodisiacal scent of a French perfume preceded her.
The man at the top of the stairs drew back out of sight and waited.
When her foot touched the runner in the corridor, the man put his right forearm about her throat and his left elbow between her shoulder blades and lifted her from the floor, cutting off her wind.
She kicked and beat him futilely with her hands as he carried her down the corridor.
“Cut it out or I’ll break your neck,” he whispered thickly, blowing her perfumed hair out of his face.
She stopped fighting and began to squirm.
He stopped before the last door toward the front and kicked softly on the bottom panel.
The upper panel was frosted glass with the words:
Casper Holmes and Associates
Public Relations spelled out in gold letters. But there was no light behind or in front, and the letters were a vague glittering.
The door opened inward abruptly. Nothing but the whites of the eyes of the man inside could be seen. The sound of Leila’s strangled breathing was loud in the pregnant silence.
“What you got?” a whisper asked.
“A woman-can’t you smell her?” the lookout whispered in reply, and stepped into Casper’s reception room, still holding her suspended by the neck.
“What is it?” a Mississippi voice asked from the other room.
“A woman,” the lookout repeated, unconsciously accenting the word.
Leila was rubbing herself seductively against him for all she was worth. Before arriving she had drenched herself in the aphrodisiacal perfume, and its scent, along with his own tongue swelling with lust, was choking him. Her trembling was setting him on fire. He lowered her to her feet and slackened his grip so she could breathe.
Suddenly a light came on in the private office, and the rectangle of a door appeared in the corner.
“Bring her in,” the voice ordered.
The lookout pushed Leila through the doorway; the other man followed.
Her eyes widened in abject terror, and she moaned.
The office was a shambles. Drawers hung open, papers littered the floor, the leather upholstery was slashed, spare clothes from the closet were torn into shreds, the safe in one corner stood open.
A heavy green shade covered the window opening onto the inside airwell, and Venetian blinds were closed tightly over the two front windows.
Street sounds came faintly, muffled by the snow. There was the soft sound of snow falling into the airwell and water running in the drainpipes. No other sounds came from inside. They had the building to themselves.
Casper lay on his back on the dark maroon rug; his legs were spread-eagled, with his ankles lashed to the legs of the desk with halves of an extension cord. He was stripped to his underwear. His arms were twisted behind him so that his hands extended above his shoulder blades and were manacled with a set of handcuffs looped across his throat. He was gagged with his own black silk scarf, tightly twisted and passing through his mouth to a knot behind his head. Blood trickled from his eyelids, seeped steadily from his huge, flaring nostrils, ran from the corners of his mouth and flowed down his cheeks alongside the scarf that gagged him.
The desk lamp had been placed on the floor and focused into his face. It supplied the only light.
His eyes were closed, and he looked near death. But Leila knew intuitively that he was conscious and alert. The knowledge kept her from fainting, but it didn’t help her terror.
The white man knelt beside him with a bloodstained knife pressed tightly against his throat. He had used the knife to slit Casper’s eyelids and jab inside his nostrils and slash his tongue, and he had threatened to use it next to relieve him of his manhood.
His coarse black hair was still plastered to his head, but his nostrils had whitened at the corners. He stared at Leila from black eyes that had the bright enameled look of a snake’s.
“Who’s she?” he asked as though without interest.
“I don’t know, she came up here with her own key.”
“I’m Leila Holmes,” she said in a voice that sounded as though her tongue had stuck to her teeth.
“Casper’s whore,” the white man said, getting to his feet. “Hold her, I’ll stab her.”
Leila whimpered and pushed closer to the lookout for protection. “You’re not going to let that cracker hurt me,” she begged in a tiny terror-stricken voice.
Suddenly, there was a horse of another color.
The black lookout shoved her to one side and drew his. 38 automatic. He didn’t aim it at the white man, but he showed it to him.
“I ain’t going for that,” he muttered.
The white man looked at him without expression.
“Go back and keep watch,” he ordered.
“Door’s locked,” the lookout said.
“Go back anyway.”
The lookout didn’t move. “What you going to do with her?”
“Kill her, goddammit, what you think?” the white man said flatly. “You think I’m going to let her live and send me to the chair?”
“We can use her to make him talk,” the lookout argued.
“You think he’s going to talk to save this whore?”
Leila had inched over to the partition separating the two rooms and now began edging slowly toward the inside window.
“Don’t let him kill me,” she begged in her little-girl’s voice to keep their attention distracted.
Her mouth was open; the tip of her tongue slid across her dry lips to make the red paint glisten. She stuck out her breasts and made her body sway as though her pelvic girdle was equipped with roller bearings. She was playing her sex along with her race for all it was worth; but her big brown eyes were dark pools of terror.
The white man turned his back on the lookout and moved toward her with the knife held in a stabbing position.
The second colored man said, “Wait a minute; he’s going to shoot you.”
The white man halted but kept staring at Leila without turning around. “What’s the matter with you niggers?” he said. “The bitch has got to be silenced; and we ain’t got all night to fool around.”
The word nigger estranged him. Where before they were divided by a woman, now they were separated by race. Neither of the colored men moved or spoke.
Down below in the Paris Bar someone had put a coin in the juke box, and the slow hypnotic beat of an oldtime platter called Bottom Blues came faintly through the floor.
The second colored man decided to act as peacemaker. “Ain’t no need of you two falling out about a woman,” he said. “Let’s consider it.”
“Consider what?” the white man said. His big, sloping shoulders beneath the loose blue coat seemed suspended in motion.
Moving inch by inch, Leila played the lookout with eyes that promised a thousand nights of frenzied love. All of her life she had played sex for kicks; now she was playing it for her life and it didn’t work the same; she felt as sexless as a leg of veal. But everything depended on it, and she forced words through her numb trembling lips.
“Don’t let him kill me, please, I beg of you. I’ll give you money-all the money you want. I’ll be every kind of woman you can think of; just don’t let him-”
“Shut up, whore,” the white man said.
“Let’s talk it over,” the lookout mouthed. Lust was shaking him like electric shocks, half choking him, draining
