over her beauty, and each caress pitched her passion higher. I kissed her breasts, teased them with my tongue. I found her with my fingers and she shivered and quivered and surged with delight.
I sought her and found her and we were together and she moaned and she held me. We rocked together and the whole earth sang.
Afterward Barbara cried a little, giggled a little, said that maybe she was a call girl after all, then cried some more. I drew her close and told her that everything was all right. She rolled on to her side, supporting her weight on an elbow, and looked at me.
“It’s been so long,” she said
“Barb—”
“So very long…”
I returned to my apartment and took a bottle to bed with me. The next day I didn’t do much of anything. I spoke to a few people on the phone—Barb, Joyce, Sy Daniels. I put in an appearance at the Glade and wound up spending the night there. Early Monday morning I left, changed clothes at my apartment, and went to the office.
It was a dull day. Then it was night, and time to work.
I stuck around the Black Sand office until Murray left. Then I carried the three onionskin copies upstairs to his office and tucked them away in a file drawer under M for Milani. I made it out of there on the double and dropped the duplicate key into a sewer. I didn’t need it anymore.
After dinner I headed for my room at the Glade and waited for the desk clerk to go across the street and return. He made the trip every evening around eight—ducked across to the Silver Dollar and had a shot and a beer, sometimes a few extra shots if he felt like it. He was a quickie drinker, but it still took him fifteen or twenty minutes and the desk was untended during that time. This time he left at five to eight and stayed away for half an hour.
Murray was home alone. Joyce had taken the younger daughter shopping and the older one had a date.
When the clerk was back behind the desk everything was ready. I rolled up my left sleeve, took a penknife from my pocket, killed the germs on the blade with my cigarette lighter flame and made a good gash halfway up my forearm. It took me three tries before I could force myself to make the cut. I sprang a capillary or two and started bleeding. I bled on the bed, dripped beads of blood onto the floor. After a few seconds I opened up a band-aid and slapped it on the cut.
Then I took a pair of hundreds from my wallet. I opened up the dresser drawer, dropped the bills on top of a flashy sport shirt and left the drawer open. After the way I had flashed money at the clerk, robbery might look like a possible motive. With money lying around like this, the cops could cross robbery off their list.
I flipped the hat on the floor, caved in the crown with my foot. I dropped the drugstore eyeglasses and stepped on them hard enough to break both lenses. I put the frames in a pocket for the time being.
My arm was beginning to throb a little. I gave a check to see if the cut were bleeding through the band-aid. No blood.
There was a glass ashtray on the little table next to the bed. I knocked it to the floor. The damned thing bounced around crazily without breaking and wound up somewhere under the bed. I dug out the receptacle and tried again. It shattered.
I picked the phone off the hook, set it down. The desk clerk started babbling hello at nobody in particular. There was a fifty-nine cent cap pistol in my pocket, a recent purchase from a notions store. I took out the pistol and squeezed the trigger. It made a nice noise, left a gunpowder smell hanging in the air. Then I picked up the telephone, and the voice I used was Murray Rogers.
“It’s nothing,” I said. “Just knocked the phone off the hook, that’s all. Forget it.”
I hung up before he could think it over. In a minute or two, if he had half a brain, he would put two and two together and deliver the desired five. I took a quick breath, then tugged the pillowcase off the pillow the management had stuck at the head of the bed. I used the pillowcase to wipe up some of the blood from the floor. Then I threw open the window and dropped down into the courtyard.
I had the pillowcase in a pocket, the hat and eyeglass frames in one hand. I tossed the hat to the ground, flipped the frames near it. The next step hurt like hell. I yanked off the band-aid, opened up the cut on my forearm and left a trail of blood leading away from the window toward the rear of the courtyard. Then I re-fastened the band-aid over the gash and took off my jacket and dragged it along the ground for twenty or thirty yards. I put on the jacket again and got the hell out of there. I didn’t run. I walked quickly to the back of the courtyard and out through the driveway. So far as I could determine, nobody had observed me.
My car was parked at the curb. I drove away from the neighborhood as fast as you can drive without risking a ticket. When I reached Murray’s house, I parked a few doors down the street. I hurried up his driveway to the rear of the house, opened a gun-metal garbage can, stuffed the bloody pillowcase into it. I put the lid on, clambered into the car and headed for my apartment.
I didn’t start to shake until I was inside my apartment with the door shut. Then my hands trembled and my heart pretended it was a triphammer. I poured a shot of scotch and spilled half of it on the way to my mouth. The second shot steadied me.
The cut on my arm had opened up again. The blood had soaked through the band-aid to the shirt and through the shirt to the jacket. That didn’t matter. I wouldn’t have much use for shirt or jacket again. I tried to make sure of the cut now. I washed it out with scotch since it had a higher alcohol content than anything else in the house, and then I fixed up the wound with a gauze pad and a few strips of adhesive.
The Broadway suit and the shirt and the loud tie all were dumped into the incinerator. There would be traces there—buttons that didn’t burn, things like that. That wouldn’t much matter. The police wouldn’t be looking in my incinerator for Milani’s clothing. The police would be looking for Milani himself, for one thing, and they wouldn’t have any interest in one William Maynard to begin with. The shoes I put into the closet along with the little cap pistol. In a day or two I would flip them into a trash barrel somewhere.
I poured another drink and tossed it off. The gash in my arm felt better now, either because the cut was healing or because the liquor was anesthetizing it. I sat down on the couch and turned on the radio, dialing in a station that gave you music and spot news twenty-four hours a day. There was a news flash at nine but it had nothing about Milani.
The hell—the plan couldn’t really miss now. The stage was set perfectly. The desk clerk at the Glade would tell the cops about a seedy criminal type from Brooklyn named August Milani who had acted as though he were going to come into a fortune, who did come into the fortune, and who told the clerk that he, Milani, made the fortune by keeping a secret for a lawyer named Murray Rogers. The cops would toothcomb Milani’s room and find the aftermath of a murder. Room knocked around, bloodstains, a broken ashtray, shattered eyeglass lenses, the faint smell of gunpowder. The desk clerk would admit he had been away for half an hour or so, obviously the logical time for Rogers to move in on the scene.
And there would be plenty more. Rogers’ receptionist would tell the police about a nasty-voiced man who had kept trying to talk to Rogers, and Murray would try to explain that the man had been some nutty insurance salesman. The authorities would find the letters in the Rogers file. Murray would deny writing them. The authorities would find the bloody pillowcase in the Rogers garbage can, and the blood would match the stains in Milani’s hotel room. Murray would say he didn’t know how the pillowcase had found its way into the garbage can. The police would ask Murray who Whitlock was and what hold Milani had over him. Murray Rogers couldn’t tell the police because he wouldn’t know anything about Whitlock or a “hold.” The authorities would keep on asking and Murray would never be able to come up with the answers.
The desk clerk would remember the messenger. The messenger would tell the cops he picked up a bundle at Murray’s office and gave it to Milani in person. Murray would say he didn’t know anything about it. The police would ask him what he did with Milani’s body and he would try to make them believe he never met any Milani, that Milani was just a persistent voice on the telephone.
Murray Rogers, the poor bastard, didn’t have a chance.
I caught a news flash at nine-thirty. A man had been assaulted or possibly murdered at a downtown hotel. Police were working on the case and had several good leads. They expected to wrap it up quickly. No names were mentioned, but the confidence was obvious. The cops had this one in the bag already and they didn’t care who knew it.
I sat there and listened to more music and wondered what was going to go wrong. Something had to go
