THE CLOSING TRAP
Originally published in Detective Story Magazine, May 1953.
CHAPTER 1
It was quiet in the big room. The full wall of windows at the west end caught the pale, slanting light of the sun in descent, and the light splashed in across deep carpeting and rich furniture to give the ivory painted concert grand at the east end a delicate old-world coloring. Behind the grand, Terence Pope fingered from memory a few old tunes, looking into the warm wash of light and feeling within himself a kind of frail peace that took its substance from the hour and, like the hour, wouldn’t last.
He didn’t see the girl called Liza Gray who stood in the arched entrance to the room looking at him, but he was thinking about her. And when she crossed the room silently and leaned against the piano, it seemed like something that ought to happen about that time and was no surprise whatever.
“Hello, Terry. I didn’t know you could play.”
He looked up at her with a smile restricted to careful friendliness, and he broke out of the tune he was playing into the soft ascension of a scale. The light gathered in her pale gold hair, dispersing along the clean lines of her face and throat, and in his heart the transient peace succumbed to pain that was almost adolescent in its intensity. Underlying the change, adult and reasoned, was the grim foreknowledge of everything coming to a bad end.
“I can pick out a tune, baby, if you call that playing.”
“You’re a strange guy. Full of little things no one would suspect.”
“We’re all like that. Full of surprises, I mean. If you keep looking long enough, you begin to find them.”
“Me, too?”
He laughed softly, his fingers searching adroitly for the beginning of another tune. “You, baby? You’ve got more surprises than Pandora’s box.”
“That was the box with all the world’s troubles in it, wasn’t it?”
“That’s the one.”
“You think I’m full of trouble, Terry?”
“For me, you are. For me, you’re trouble in spades. That ought to be obvious. Because you’re a lovely, lovely hunk of stuff, and you’re Guy Sebastian’s. Guy doesn’t like the hired help feeling possessive about his property.”
“You afraid of Guy?”
He laughed again, shortly. “I’m supposed to say no? I’m supposed to push out my chest like a Rover Boy? You know the right answer. Hell, yes, I’m afraid of Guy! I’m afraid of him the same way you’re afraid of him. The same way any little guy is afraid of any big guy with money and power and the ruthlessness to throw them around.”
She slipped around the curve of the grand piano and sat on the bench beside him. “Little guys grow.”
His fingers moved out of one tune, into another. “There’s something else, baby. There’s the fact that Guy’s been a pretty good friend.”
“Don’t be a fool, Terry. Guy doesn’t have friends. Like you said, he has property. I don’t get it, Terry. A bright guy like you, with a big chunk of education. What are you doing here?”
“Haven’t you heard? I’m Guy Sebastian’s secretary.”
“Don’t play, coy with me.” Her mouth sagged at the corners, losing for a moment its beautiful lines. “You’re no more a secretary than I am. You’re a deluxe errand boy. Pleasant presence and fancy talk. We’re both the same. Figure a name for me, and we’ll share it.”
His fingers went on with the thin, tinsel tune. Hadn’t the knowledge been a sickness in his soul for the eight long months past? He shrugged. “Regrets, Liza?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe it depends on you. You haven’t answered my question.”
“Why I’m here? I could ask the same of you.”
“If you did, I’d tell you.”
“I’m a lazy guy with no special ambition and no incentive to make big stuff of his little talents… And, well—all tyrants have guys like me around, Liza. Hitler had one to play the piano and tell jokes…”
“As simple as that?”
“That’s right. And now it’s your turn.”
“It’s a matter of values, I guess,” she said slowly. “It’s a matter of overestimating the things you’re born without. Things like mink and money and all this. You want them, you go after them. You work the only way you can—by investing natural assets. For a long time after you get them, you think they’re good enough. But then something comes along to let you know they’re not. Something, or someone. Can you play My Desire, Terry?”
His brain said no, but his fingers wouldn’t listen. They ran a scale and worked back down into the tune.
“It’s for you and me, that tune. You know it’s for you and me,” she said softly. He let the tune die, and turned on the bench to face her. Her pale blond hair fell forward from a low side part, to cast her face in shadow.
He saw again the perfect structure of bone beneath perfect skin, and he told himself again, for the thousandth time, not to be a fool.
“Don’t say it, baby. Even to say it means the end of luck.”
“Maybe not. Maybe we could get Guy to see it our way.”
“He’d crucify us and you know it. He’d nail us on the wall and celebrate with a wake.”
“You’ve got to believe in luck…”
“We’d never get away with it. Never in the world,” he said.
“We could talk to Guy together…”
He took her by the shoulders and pushed her roughly away. Getting up from the bench, he moved around the piano and stood with his back to her.
After a while, he turned and went back to her and found that she was standing waiting quietly.
He said harshly, “Forget it, Liza.”
She moved against him.
“Tell me how, Terry. Tell me how to forget.”
He couldn’t, because he didn’t know, and suddenly his right hand moved up into her
