The supplicant follows at an abashed distance. Again that hesitant touch on the arm, as McManus stops once more, crouches, about to step into a squad car at the curb.
This time McManus whirls on him exasperatedly. “Get outa here!” he roars savagely. “What d’ya want? Who are you anyway?”
“Jeremiah Tompkins,” is the disclaiming answer. “And I’ve— I’ve been trying to give myself over to you.”
20
End of the Wait
IT WAS THE AWFUL SILENCE that was so hard to bear. They couldn’t get him to say anything any more, he was past speech. Almost, he was past life itself. If there was any spark of it left, it was sunk so deep within the cold, accumulated ash of fear that not a glimmer of it peered through. Technically, he was still alive. His heart was going, his breath was going. His eyes were open, though whether they saw anything any more was problematical. But spiritually, he was dead already. As completely, as irreparably dead as a cadaver on a mortician’s table.
They weren’t as lucky. They were both still alive enough to feel. They were without speech, too, but not from the same cause. They still had use of their voices. But there wasn’t anything to say, so they quit trying after a while.
The girl’s face was the color of talcum. Shawn’s was the darker color of granite, with glistening lines of sweat pinpointed along it here and there. But his—Reid’s—wasn’t a face any more. It was just that puckered part of the corpse where the eyes and mouth and nose used to be.
Shawn knew they’d never forget this night, the two of them, no matter what else happened for the rest of their lives. It would never be altogether over, either. It would never completely fade into daylight again. It had grown too dark this one night. Some of the darkness would always be left behind. They were getting scars on their souls, the sort of scars people got in the Dark Ages, when they believed in devils and black magic. Scars that would never completely heal. Pain would leave, the stiffness would leave, some day, but the scars would always be there, if you kneaded real hard and close. When it got dark, when other nights came, when other fears came, there would be twinges.
The clock was there in the room with them yet. It was far better to have it than not to have it, far less torment to see it than not to see it. That problem had decided itself long ago. Not for his sake any longer, for their own now as well. He wouldn’t have badgered and asked them any more, he was past even that now. It was they who had to know now, had to watch. The pendulum, like a harried gold planet, kept flashing back and forth behind the glass that trapped it. A thin splinter of white remained between the two black hands. It was two minutes to twelve.
It was like drops of water falling onto a hollowed wood surface. Clop, clop, clop, clop.
Jean kept manipulating her two solacing hands over his temples, stroking them gently, soothing them. Like a masseuse. But like an absent-minded masseuse, who has been massaging for so long that she has forgotten she is doing it, has forgotten to stop.
Shawn thought rebelliously, Damn! Why doesn’t it happen? Something, anything! Big, noisy, the works; I don’t care what it is. Why doesn’t a lion bust headfirst through the window over there and send glass showering all over the room? Now, this very minute! Why doesn’t a stream of bullets come spitting in from the dark out there? Let him get killed! Let me get killed, too! Yes, even let her get killed! Only, get it over; let something happen! Anything would be better than this nothing. He began to swivel the muzzle of his gun restlessly in and out atop his thigh, turned flat on its side. I’m going to shoot pretty soon, he warned himself. I’m going to have to. And I only hope there’s something there to shoot at, because I’m going to shoot whether there is or not. I’m going to go gun-happy, I feel it coming on. He lowered his head, and pinched it tight across the forehead for a minute with his other hand.
Then he remembered that she was there, and that pulled him out of it again, for another minute or so.
It was one to, now. The white splinter had been pared to a thread. If you had very good eyes you could still see it. If not, you could just see the two double-width hands. Clop, clop, clop, clop; the horses of death were trotting to the post.
Suddenly the figure in the chair was holding out a hand toward each of them. They’d already thought him incapable of further motion, but this must have been the final flicker.
A scratchy sound that was no longer a voice came from him.
“I’m going to say good-bye now. Take my hand, son. Thank you for—for staying with me to the end. Jean, darling, come around in front of me, kiss me good-bye. I can’t turn my head.”
She hid his face with hers for a moment. The warm, living mass of her hair took the place of the taut, bone-stretched dead skin.
The two hands were single-width now. They had blended perfectly, one atop the other. The clock had only one hand. The time was now. The time was death.
A bell, a pair of them with a flickering hammer in between, began to jingle, febrile, flutelike, puling. It was like a lowering mountain of menace spewing forth a squeaky toy mouse on wheels.
They jumped as though the filament of a live wire had been put to their skins; the two living did, at least. Shawn’s gun nearly went off by reflex action. They couldn’t orient their faculties for a moment; everything had been centered on the clock for so long.
The sound interrupted itself, then resumed. Its rhythm told what it was, that break that kept recurring. It was a telephone ringing; the one outside in the main hall, up from this room, over against the stair base.
Shawn was on his feet, arrested, half crouched.
Bong! the clock went, mellowly, majestically. The hour was sounding. It was almost anticlimactic to the other, the lesser noise. There was a needling immediacy to that, it tattooed their nerves.
Shawn had the key out. He was over at the door now, looking back at the two of them, head inclined, as if trying to analyze what the sound boded by its very timbre.
Reid’s incised lips kept fluttering. Words finally came, hoarsely. “No, don’t— It may be a trick, a trap to get you away from us—”
Bong! the clock went a second time. It seemed to send out waves of jarred air, as though the room were a still pool and something heavy had been dropped into the middle of it.
It resumed again, as though touched off by the greater sound. There was a different rhythm now, its tempo was faster.
Jean’s hand caught in her hair. “Go out and stop it,” she choked. “I can’t stand it any more.”
“Wait a minute,” he said. “That’s a police call. Three short rings at a time— They told me they’d use that if they wanted to get me.”
His wrist flicked and the door was open. He widened it behind him.
“I’ll be right out here in full sight of the door,” he said. “Nothing can get past me.”
He saw her crouch protectively over Reid, enfold him, draw him to her with both her arms.
He stepped quickly down to the phone, stopped, lifted it, gun hand watchfully fanning the empty air around him as he stood there. Shadow-boxing the emptiness.
Bong! welled out to him from the distance, like a mucous tide.
It was McManus. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” Shawn bit out, eyes roving the walls, the stairs over him, the securely locked main door down at the end of the hall.
“It’s over. We’ve beaten the rap. The guy’s saved. Tompkins just committed suicide in his cell. Took everything away from him, and he found a way to do it anyway. Broke one of the large flat buttons he had on his clothing, and used the jagged edge to open his throat. Didn’t find him in time.”
Bong! vibrated in Shawn’s eardrum.
“Just before that I had a call from Molloy. A large lion that was on the loose ever since this afternoon was shot and killed. Only about twenty miles up from where you are. Tell him. Tell him it’s over, nothing more to worry about. No time to tell you any more now. I’ll be out there quick as I can myself, starting right now—”
/> Bong! cut across it, fourth stroke of the hour.
Her frenzied scream blended in with it, searing through him like cauterization. He dropped the phone like a red-hot rivet.
Reid flashed through the open room door, like an inanimate projectile fired by some detonation within. He shot straight down the long hall toward the entrance door at the far end, darting with a swiftness that could not have been rational physical motion any longer, that was rather an integral spasmodic symptom of death throes already well in progress.
“Hold him! He’s gone out of his mind!” she screamed from the room.
“Door’s locked, he can’t get out!” he shouted. He sprinted after him, sure to overtake him within a matter of seconds as the immovable door blocked the insane flight. He had a glimpse of her, as he passed the open doorway, lying semiprone upon the floor within the room, either flung there by Reid as he burst free with final superhuman strength or dragged there after him until her hold was exhausted and she dropped from him.
The door was directly before Reid now. “I’m coming!” he keened wildly, “I’m coming!” as though racing toward an invisible appointment.
He turned suddenly, leftward, almost at contact point with the door, and disappeared into the darkness of the conservatory, on that side. “I’m coming!” came once more from the darkness.
There was a sudden crackling crash, and then silence.
“The lights! For God’s sake, the lights! I can’t see a thing in here!” Shawn beat both hands wildly up and down the inside facing of the doorway. She was uphall, staggering down after him, sobbing. With lack of breath rather than grief.
He found the switch just before she reached him, tripped it.
The lights glowed on behind those beautiful cathedrallike panels, ruby, emerald, amber, sapphire. Reid was standing upright, motionless, close up against one of them. Shoulders and head bent forward, as though he were peering closely at it, myopically close.
For a second Shawn couldn’t understand what was holding him there. Then he saw that he was headless, or seemed to be; he ended at the neck. Jagged teeth of thick, splintered glass held his craned neck in a vise, formed a collar, had pierced his jugular. His head was on the other side, had been rammed through the leaded pane to the space where the lights were. You could see the dark shadow that was his life blood running down the inside of the lighted pane in uneven sprayed tendrils, pacing one another, dimming its magnificent coloring.
He was gone.
And the panel he’d chosen, he’d aimed himself unerringly at, in his blind headlong flight, with the room pitch-black around him, out of all the many others, was that of the lion rampant. Its mane and rabid eyes and flat feline nostrils still showed undestroyed above his gashed neck, as though it were swallowing him bodily. And for fangs now, instead of painted ones it had those jagged incisors of glass, thrusting into his flesh from all sides of the orifice he himself had created.
Death by the jaws of a lion.
Bong! the clock went for the twelfth time, and the hour was past. All was silence.
21
End of Night
THE TENSION WAS GONE FROM the room now. It was like a place where the air has been cleared by a violent electrical discharge. It was tinctured with past fear, but fear in the present, in the actuality, was no longer in it. Just a shadowy awe remained behind, clinging to its walls, as in a place where death has been.
The girl was gone. Someone else was gone too. Someone it was better not to think about. (Shawn tried not to think about him; failed each time; tried again.) Gone for good, gone forever; beyond pain, beyond fear, beyond time, the enemy.
The clock was still there. The golden planet still swung. The hollow-hoofed horses still galloped, clop, clop, clop, clop, for someone else now. For the next one. The hands were at four and at six. Half past four in the morning.
The house was quiet. The door had closed long before on the trundling stretcher bearers; and it seemed as though that was the last sound there had been. And it seemed as though that had been a long, long time ago.
Shawn and McManus were alone in there. McManus picked up his hat, looked at it, put it on; in the slow way of a man who has been contemplating departure for some time past, and now has brought himself at last to the point of carrying it out.
“What was it?” he said. “What’ll I say? I’m going back to town now. Tomorrow or the day after, I’ll have to be making out a report on it. Oh, I’ll have the report of the medical examiner. A severed jugular, he’ll say; something like that. But what’ll I say, what’ll I put down, that’s what I’m wondering. Death by accident. Death while of unsound mind. Murder by mental suggestion. Death by decree of—” He turned speculative eyes toward the windows, where the draperies were now thrown wide, and restless twinkles simmered across the face of the sky.
“Are you asking me, lieutenant?”
“No,” McManus said. “I’m asking—myself.” He moved on toward the door. “Oh, the report’ll be made. And the word that I’ll put down, that won’t matter much. Because no hand touched him. And that’s all we, the police, are for. To see that no hand’s raised.” He shook his head. “But there are so many things I’ll never know for sure.” Then he added abruptly, “Will you?”
Shawn didn’t answer. He put out one of the lamps, and as though the same switch controlled them, the glimmering outside the windows grew that much brighter, came that much closer.
They went out into the hall one behind the other, Shawn behind his chief.
“We have all the answers,” McManus said. “I mean I have, down at my office. But the answers don’t really answer anything. There’s a ‘why’ in this too big to go down on any report. It seems to slip away each time you think you’ve got it pinned down. The man who was shot dead the other night on the stairs of Tompkins’ rooming house—well, we’ve identified him. He was Walter Myers, and he was Reid’s broker. He handled all Reid’s financial affairs, all his investments, for years past. It’s the same old story, as old as the first brokerage office, as old as the first share of stock ever floated on a stock market. Temptation, too much funds to manipulate, too much carelessness on the part of a wealthy client. Reid didn’t go near him for years at a time, left everything in his hands.”
He put out his hand to the doorknob, and then left it there, without turning it.
“It’ll take years to uncover all his activities, check through all his accounts. Years and a brigade of auditors. Anyway, I can tell you this much right now, before going any further. That girl upstairs will be poor. Maybe not poor as you and I go, but poor to what she was until now.”
“Good,” said Shawn softly, fervently; so low that the other man didn’t even catch it.
“Well, he got himself into a great big hole, somewhere along the way. And he kept trying to shore up the bottom by dumping in Reid’s funds and securities. Only, there was no bottom to shore up; it got deeper all the time, the way those things do. Eventually, some day, there was bound to be a cave-in, and he knew that as well as anyone else. It was staring him in the face as surely as—”
He thumbed toward the room they had just come from, and Shawn knew what he meant.
“The only thing in his favor was, there was no hard and fast deadline on it, he could still string it out a while, he had a few months’ time. But there were just two possible outcomes: either a crash, and exposure, or flight without waiting for the crash, and exposure. Maybe he didn’t have the stomach for flight. Or maybe the way his affairs were fixed, he wouldn’t have been able to flee wealthy, he would have had to flee broke. So he had to sit tight and wait, shaking in his shoes.
“And then something happened that must have seemed a godsend to him at the time.
“Among his other clients—he didn’t have very many—there was a wealthy old woman. You know the type. Not as juicy as Reid, and a lot more stingy, so he seems to have had sense enough to let her alone. But he noticed she was having uncanny luck with her amateurish, shoestrin
g investments, while he himself kept going down in quicksand. I don’t know how he broke her down, but he had a way with him, and he finally got to the bottom of it. He learned she was getting tips from her housemaid. And the housemaid in turn was getting them, especially for her, from some unrevealed source.
“This particular woman has died since, and the maid herself took her own life. But we have enough evidence to reconstruct the thing. We have records showing that an Eileen McGuire was employed as maid by such-and-such a woman at such-and-such a time, and also records that that same woman was a client of Walter Myers. It’s a pretty logical reconstruction, isn’t it?”
Shawn nodded.
“Anyway, Myers finally ferreted out the source of the information, and, his curiosity aroused, he went there to investigate. From there on, there’s a very great blank to be filled in. This part is purely supposition. Neither one of them is alive any more to tell us just what went on; we have to fill it in as best we can, with the little we have.
“Myers didn’t do any better in his transactions and frantic jugglings, so it’s safe to assume Tompkins didn’t help him as he had the woman. Either that, or else Myers was already in such a mess by that time that a few tips on the market were no longer enough to pull him out of it. He needed to come into outright control of the balance of Reid’s fortune, be no longer subject to an accounting, in order to cover up the previous defalcations. You can misuse your own money, and not be held accountable; misuse somebody else’s and you go to jail.
“Here’s what set the fuse to the bombshell. Tompkins had his room practically papered with unsolicited and uncashed checks that Reid had thrust on him at various times. Myers came across one of these, and that gave him the idea for the whole setup. Tompkins wouldn’t co-operate knowingly, he didn’t want anything from anybody, so Myers deliberately framed him, to get something on him. We can only guess at what it was, and if our guess is right, it was pretty crude. But Tompkins was a simple man, a rustic, and Myers was a glib talker, so he seems to have got away with it. One of Reid’s checks turned up in Myers’ office, we found it there. It had been endorsed over to Myers by Tompkins, to whom it was originally made out. It had been lifted from five hundred to five thousand dollars. And in such a sloppy way that it wouldn’t have passed any bank teller in the world, not even one who was stone-blind. But the important thing about it is this: it had never been presented for payment at any bank. Myers was just keeping it as something to hold over Tompkins’ head. I don’t think Tompkins was the one who endorsed it, and I don’t think he was the one who lifted its face value. He could have got a genuine five-thousand-dollar check from Reid any time he wanted to, just by crooking his little finger. I think Myers did both those things, and then threatened him with the consequences.”
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