Aline didn’t faint at sight of the dead man. She swayed sideways against the door frame and closed her eyes tightly. She kept them closed, and tottered backward until her legs encountered the edge of the bed.
She sat down and let her eyes open. The back of the man’s head was toward her and she couldn’t see his features. There was a tiny round bald spot in the thinning brown hair. She stared at the bald spot in growing panic, and knew he was a complete stranger. He wore a light tropical suit.
Aline made her eyes stay open, but they kept sliding away from the body. She fought against utter retching misery and tried to force her thoughts into a coherent pattern.
She looked down fearfully at her hands and wrinkled white slip, but saw no sign of blood. She didn’t know yet how the man had been killed. She didn’t know who he was. She didn’t know…
God, oh God! Oh, God.
She buried her face in her hands and sank sideways on the bed and sobbed again, convulsively. When the tears stopped, she was physically exhausted, but her mind was alert and she knew what she had to do.
Get out of that room for one thing, and trust in God that no one had seen her and recognized her coming in. But before that she must make certain there was nothing left behind that would point to her.
The only thing missing was her handbag. The only place she hadn’t searched was the bathroom. She couldn’t. But she knew she had to.
The drive of utter desperation brings a queer sort of strength sometimes. She sat up and took her hands from her face. She reached down with shaking fingers, pulled up the stocking that was loose around her ankle and rolled it above the knee. She picked up her discarded panties and stepped into them with a feeling of repugnance, smoothed her slip and then pulled the print dress over her head.
She kept her eyes carefully averted from the open bathroom door as she went to the mirror and looked unhappily at her disordered hair, her ravaged and tear-stained face, and wished desperately for a comb and compact. Her purse! If she could find it in the bathroom…
She couldn’t waste time now. She stepped into her pumps and walked steadily to the bathroom door. She didn’t look at the body until she found the light switch and clicked it.
She studied the man’s left profile. His face was pallid and waxlike, curiously pinched and shrunken. He was clean-shaven, between thirty and forty years of age, and in death his features gave the unpleasant impression of feral cunning. She would never know, she told herself dully, whether that look had come with death or had been there when she came to the hotel room with him.
The cause of death was now clearly evident. There was a great, gaping wound in his throat that had been inflicted by a very sharp knife or a razor.
She jerked her gaze away and searched the room from the doorway. The tub was empty, and the only two possible places where her bag might be concealed were the closed medicine cabinet and the floor space covered by his body. By holding tightly to the doorframe and leaning inward, Aline was able to open the cabinet. It was empty.
Almost, then, she gave up the search. But the instinct of self-preservation was alive in her, and strength surged up from some depth of her being which made it possible for her to reach down with both hands, get a firm grip on the back of the dead man’s coat between the shoulderblades and drag his body over the sill and into the bedroom.
There was no purse in sight. Only a curious half-outline of his body, where blood had crept along the floor and congealed on the tiles.
But he had pockets, and Aline knew she must go through them. The bag was small enough to fit in a man’s outer jacket pocket. Besides, she had to do everything she could to discover his identity before leaving him. If she could learn who he was… if she could start backtracking through the night at once… before the police started… it was barely possible she might be able to destroy all traces that would point to her as his companion at the death scene.
There was a book of matches in his left side pocket, and a few loose coins in the right. The inner jacket pocket yielded nothing. She knelt beside him with averted face and forced her hand into each of his four trouser pockets, half turning his body to do it.
There was nothing. No keys and no wallet. Not a scrap of paper to identify him.
He had come out of the unknown, a stranger to her… and now he would be a stranger forever.
And she? She had become a stranger to herself. Somehow she must go on living… forever haunted by the fear that she might have killed him.
Not that! She couldn’t kill. The last few minutes had proved that she was capable of much she would not have believed possible. But not murder… Besides, if she had murdered him during a blackout, how had she disposed of the murder weapon? And the missing handbag?
Of course, it was possible she had left the bag somewhere or lost it along the way before reaching the hotel room. But the murder weapon had been in the room. And now it wasn’t. Wouldn’t the police accept that fact as evidence that another person had been in the room while she was blacked out?
They wouldn’t. For they would never know, as she did, that the knife was not in the room when she woke. The police would have only her word that she hadn’t wakened to find it clutched in her hand, and then disposed of it.
She must be very careful from this point on. She must take nothing for granted. Nothing! Once it was known that she had been the dead man’s companion, every single word she spoke would be suspect.
How could she prove, for instance, that she had actually blacked out and didn’t know what had happened? There was no proof. Only her word. And to give the lie to that would be the testimony of the hotel clerk, the bell- boy and elevator operator who had doubtless seen her come in. Because when she had blacked out like this in the past, there was practically no outward evidence. Even her closest friends were never quite sure. They had laughed about it in the past, and she had laughed with them. Her coordination was scarcely impaired at all. She had been told that there was a slight thickness in her speech, but no more than in most persons after several cocktails.
Anyone who did not know her intimately and who had seen her last night would swear on the witness stand that she might have been a little tight, but certainly in full possession of her faculties.
The dead man must have believed that. He would have had no way of knowing the truth Even the murderer must have been unaware that she was unconscious when the murder was committed.
Why, then, had he gone away leaving her alive to bear witness against him? Of course if he had arrived at the scene after she fell into a coma on the bed, he would know he had nothing to fear from her.
She dragged her thoughts back from useless speculations. The important thing now was to destroy all evidence she had been in the room, and then leave the hotel without being seen.
She stripped the case from one of the pillows and methodically wiped fingerprints from every surface she might have touched. Then she went to the mirror to smooth her hair as best she could with shaking fingers.
At the door, she hesitated, realizing that she was probably destroying the murderer’s fingerprints as well. But what else could she do? She wiped the knob clean and turned it cautiously, inching the door open, and testing the outer knob. It was on the night-latch. The murderer had simply walked out and pulled it shut.
She paused, an instant, undecided whether to wipe the outer knob clean, then suddenly scrubbed it as hard as she could.
Holding the outer knob with the pillow case, she hesitated again, gathering all her strength and courage before stepping out and closing the door. That was the irrevocable step. Once she closed the door she was locked away from her last chance to call the police, tell them the simple truth, and hope they would believe her.
For a moment she was desperately tempted to do that. Wasn’t it what any innocent, law-abiding person would do? Wasn’t running away practically an admission of guilt?
Probably it was. She didn’t care. She couldn’t face it. This way, she had a chance. The other way? Who would believe her story, she asked herself scornfully.
She closed the door firmly with the pillowslip covering her hand, and stood for a moment memorizing the room number, 318. She would have to wait until she was outside to learn the name of the hotel.
She turned and went left toward a small red bulb illuminating a sign that said STAIRS. There was a door which she opened, and, with the cunning of the hunted, she took the upward flight of stairs. She remembered reading a book where a suspect had been trapped by walking down a flight instead of up. When he took the elevator from the floor below, the detective had known instantly that he had walked down one flight, and promptly arrested him. The author of the book had pointed out that in panic one invariably takes the easier path, and that if he had
