He watched them going out the door, before he sat down to work again. Big Bat had his big red haired paw on the shoulder of that dumb eyed man, with his look of a nine-months-old infant examining a feather. And Kerry thought that Big Bat had understood . . .
CHAPTER NINE
Killer
That Kerry Ott, the big deaf maker of plays, had any idea that his death was near him, even in the most submerged recesses of his mind, seems unlikely.
There he was, a man who was always sure that he knew the way men's minds work, and the probability of their actions in a given situation. He knew that Big Bat O'Brien was intelligent, strong, and relentless. He knew the killer looked dumb and had acted dumb.
It seemed to him that he was finished with it. It had been just a bad play, a terrible play, conceived and acted out in a hysterical, addlepated, confusedly adlibbing way by a fatheaded murderer. That was the terrible thing about it. An actor must have entered a stage somehow before he can exit from it, in any play. But there that brainless fat headed goon had been seen by an audience exiting at a wild hysterical rush from a stage, without an explanation of how he had ever got onto it.
Rushing down the stairs from Dan McCue's door. That had been his first appearance on the scene—getting off it. No one had asked him when he had gone up to Dan McCue's door, or how else he had got there, except by going up the stairs, and he had not explained, since there would have been no explanation. Slipsky had been in the lobby for at least fifteen minutes, and the elevator man, too, and would have seen him coming in, if he had come in that way. He hadn't been a man who had come in. He had been a man who had been leaving, by the nearest and quickest way that he could think of, with that yellow light and red pipe glow which he had seen down below the fire escape out back. Maybe he hadn't thought of the need of explaining how he had come in, with his need to explain how he must have got away. And nobody had asked him.
It made a play, Kerry thought, beginning, 'Exit, murderer.' Like Alice through the looking glass, where everyone runs backwards. A very bad play indeed. If the guy hadn't been such a dumbbell, someone would have asked him just where he came in, and he would have never got away as far as he had. Which had been only as far as here, to a spider's web and a nailed window across the alley, seeking a way out.
The one bright thing he had done, apparently, had been to rush up to the fifth and ring the elevator bell, before rushing down. But even a moron has one brain cell. He had hidden on a landing of the stairs, behind the elevator operator's back, as the cage arose. Except for Slipsky, he would probably have gotten away unseen. It must have been a dreadful moment for him when he saw that form in blue watching for him quietly behind the pillar in the lobby.
A dreadful moment, in a different way, when he learned that Slipsky hadn't been a real cop, and that he might have made him and Boaz the goats for Dan McCue's murder, if he had only played it a little differently.
A ham actor, who had done a terrible play. It had been awful to watch Big Bat O'Brien's lips reciting the crudities of it, and project it before his eyes. But it was finished. Big Bat was keen and intelligent, and certainly must have got it. He had had his hand on that feather eyed killer's shoulder when they went out.
Only Kerry failed to take into calculation the strength of an established idea. The idea that a tuxedo cop could be anything more than comical in any connection with police work would never occur to Big Bat O'Brien. Particularly Tuxedo Johnny. He was just a laugh. Unless Big Bat had seen those vicious murders being done before his eyes by that pink faced man with the bewildered eyes, it would quite likely have been impossible for him to believe that Tuxedo Johnny could do them. Even if he had seen them, he might have regarded them as an optical illusion, and gone down to see the eye man, rubbing his pupils.
'I don't get it, Johnny,' Big Bat had said, with his big, red haired paw on Tuxedo Johnny's shoulder as they went out the door of the little room and down the long railroad hall. 'Ott is usually smart in seeing things in a scene that you describe to him. Where this actor is, and where that. He says a playwright has to be. He calls it constructive imagination. He seemed to hint that I was something of a boob for not seeing for myself. But, by God, as I can see it, it leaves nowhere for him to have got away to at all when the boys came in at front and back, not more than two minutes at the most after Kitty had screamed. That must mean that he—was right.'
'Rasmussen!' said Tuxedo Johnny Blythe, sweating. 'Rasmussen, the gnome janitor, Bat!' With the most brilliant thinking he had done all evening, and perhaps in his life. And thinking for his life.
'That's who this bird Ott, who doesn't know where he is at, meant it must have been, Bat,' he said, thinking fast, and sweating. 'I can see it all plain now, dumb as I am. Rasmussen was in the apartment when I was there at the door. He unchained it and followed me down when I went rushing down the stairs. He took the lobby stairs into the basement, while I was talking to Slipsky, ran through to the back, and was out there smoking his pipe when Slipsky and I arrived. Can you imagine how smart he was?
'After telling us that crazy story of having seen the devil on the fire escape, he followed us up the escape, got in the window just behind us, rushed across the living room into the hall and into the bedroom before I had got the library lights turned on, and killed Kitty. Fixed the bulb, too—he'd have had time for that—it could have been longer that I thought. He had all the motive in the world, too. He thought Dan had been getting gay with his daughter. My God, why didn't I think of him before?'
'He's lame, Johnny.'
'It's only a disguise. Don't let him fool you. He's probably fast as lightning. Don't let any doctor tell you any different either. A guy as smart as that can fool any doctor.'
'Would he have had time, as he was rushing from the living room into the bedroom, after you and Slipsky had entered and before you got the lights on, to have stopped and put the chain on the door again, Johnny? He had had to take it off to get out and follow you down, you know. And it would have made a jangle as he put it on which you should have heard. And so on.'
'Why, Kitty put the chain on the door, Bat,' said Tuxedo Johnny quietly. 'Hadn't you got that figured out, Bat? She came in after old Dan had been killed, I've got it figured out, with the key she had, with those birthday roses for him. It was all dark, and she thought he had gone to bed. But she wanted to arrange the roses in water and put them in his bedroom where he could see them in the morning. She just slipped the chain on the door for the few minutes she would be in, so none of the different friends that he had given keys to might come in and wake him up while she was arranging them. She tiptoed through the bedroom into the bathroom, thinking he was sleeping in the big bed, picking up a bowl that she knew of from his chiffonnier in the darkness and went into the bathroom. She arranged the roses, and maybe waited till she had finished smoking a cigarette. Then she came out, and saw—him. And suddenly she knew—she knew he was a murderer, and she went hysterical, and let out that scream—'
Tuxedo Johnny swallowed.
'I've got it all figured out, Bat,' he said. 'I got it figured out some time ago.' As indeed he had.
'It fits,' said Big Bat slowly. 'It fits. She was the one who put the chain on, after Dan was dead. The killer went out, and in again. That was one thing that was puzzling me—What he was doing in those eleven and a half or twelve minutes. But that answers it. Rasmussen was the killer. Johnny, you'd have made a cop yet, if you'd stuck to it. You aren't so dumb.'
He came up the worn old dusty stairs of Argyll Hall soundlessly and obscurely, hugging the poor, torn wallpaper against the staircase wall. The dwellers in the dingy flats were all asleep in this black hour of morning.
There was no pan faced elevator man in front, no gnome janitor with burning eyes in back, in Argyll Hall. People here minded their own business. They were not prying. They kept their eyes down when they moved up or down the stairs. And they were all asleep.
He saw no one. No one saw him. An obscure figure in his
suit of cobweb grey, with his coat lapels turned up above his neck, with his hat brim pulled down above his eyes. He even simulated in part a drunken man's uncertain tread. The worn wooden flights had been mounted or descended by many such vague figures in the many years they had stood here, in the old building. Perhaps by some on the same errand. His right hand was jammed in his coat pocket as he mounted softly upward, pressing against the dingy stair wall beneath the dim infrequent bulbs.
He was on the fourth floor now. He went down it, tiptoeing, past the door with silent padding cats behind it, which was the door of Michael Finley, stepping no less silently than they, towards the trapdoor ladder at the end.
He mounted up it. This time he would have another way out, just in case. As Big Bat had said, even a goon would think to have another way. There was the clothesline stretched above the parapet, which he had observed as he stood on the first floor escape landing of the Royal Arms, waiting for Slipsky, waiting to go up and discover Dan dead, and put the chain upon the door. Not knowing that she was in there, that the chain was on already. Not knowing that to have the chain on would leave him no way out.
He had noted that rope, as he noted a great many things, with his round eyes of an infant examining a feather. As he noted, a few years ago at Nantucket, while swimming with Dan, Junior, that the boy was floundering a little, and was not a good swimmer, afraid of water. And so, the next time he had taken him out in a rowboat, in his bathing suit, a mile off shore, had asked him to lean back and fetch that painter dangling off the stern; and just accidentally with a crabbing oar had given the boy a nudge, which had knocked him out into the water—for a long time, it seemed to him, for a long, long time, the boy had followed him, floundering, gasping, sobbing, calling out to him, as he had pulled hard for shore. He had been afraid the boy would make it, and indeed, he had made it more than three-quarters home.
With his round feather filled bewildered eyes, that noted a great many things—that had noted the tetanus culture in the laboratory of his old collegemate, the research biologist, one day last autumn when he had been on a bumbling visit. Finding the time, in his bewildered way, while Doc Joe explained it to him and he examined it, to impregnate a pin with it.
He had gone to Sue and Paul that evening, to see Jennie. The divorce of twelve years before had been friendly; they were modern people and he and Paul both worked for Dan. He had surrendered none of his rights over Jennie. The right to see her at any time. He had picked up and been fondling the cat which Finley had given Sue for Jennie, a tortoiseshell with a milk face, while he had been standing talking with Sue and Paul right in the hall. And Sue and Paul had turned their faces for a moment, as Jennie had called goodnight to them from the doorway of her bedroom. Suddenly the cat in his arms, which was brushing against Sue's arm, had scratched her, with one claw, thrusting deep.
Oh, it must have been a cat. Cats scratch. And it had been in his arms, brushing her. He wouldn't have stuck a pin in her, would he, with his round bewildered eyes? Right before the eyes of Paul and Jennie. So it was just the deep dig of a cat's claw, and nothing to go to the doctor for. And tetanus serum must be used quickly.
A drowned boy washed up on the beach, with water filled lungs and a burst heart, but with his face quiet and at peace—calmed by death, calmed by the sea, after all his agony. A woman, placid, middle aged, who had loved him once, though wisely not for long, who had died of tetanus—not a pleasant way to die. The doctors and nurses hadn't liked to talk of it—too tragically preventable. But that look of last agony had been wiped out on her face, too, by death, or by the undertaker's art.
Two quiet murders, when the opportunity had been presented. But never red bloody murder before tonight. It was his first contact with it. He didn't like it. It had been the only way to get old Dan, though. You couldn't drown him. You couldn't scratch him. He was too tough and strong. From behind, with all strength and fury, that had been the only way to do it to old Dan. Any one of those blows should have killed him, but still he had reached his phone. He had been tough, it had been bad. Bad old Dan.
The blood that he had got upon his hands, without knowing it till he was outside the door! He must have left prints of it on the doorknob, he had realized, and perhaps on the door frame. A huge and flooding tide pouring down the stairs after him as he fled. But there couldn't have been much blood on the door knob. Kitty couldn't have noticed it. The precinct men who had come in hadn't seen any. They had just laid it down to his imagination—poor dumb bewildered Johnny.
He had washed the blood off his hands with soap and water in the bathroom, swiftly, when Slipsky had fled, stepping in the darkness over that dead form lying on the bathroom threshold, with her dead staring eyes. Had she fainted when she collapsed in terror, with that scream at sight of him, and had her head struck the hard tiled floor, and she known nothing more? Or had she been awake, and knowing him, when he had reached her in three seconds, swift, swift as a leaping tiger in the darkness, falling on a knee beside her and stifling any second scream that might come from her warm soft throat, reaching up with his other hand to old Dan's bathroom shelf?
Whether she had known him, or not known him, in that last swift dreadful second, he would never know, with her black eyes upon him. But she had known that he had murder in him long ago. A woman knows that about the man she loves.
Terror at the sight of him with his bloody hand, at old Dan's door, as she came out of the bathroom! Sheer terror, and she had screamed, collapsing. And he had been in there with her, swift, swift as a tiger, in three seconds more. The tiger on the bound moves swift and straight. The paralysed doe awaits its death.
Tuxedo Johnny Blythe, with his bewildered eyes which saw so much. With the wellkept, well fed, gymnasium conditioned muscles beneath his plump pink hide . . .
On the roof of the old tenement he cut the clothesline stretched above the parapet which he had seen. It was good, new stuff—he ran it swiftly through his slick fingertips—with a tensile strength of all of three hundred pounds. He bent one end of it with a bosun's knot around an iron stanchion set in the brick parapet, just opposite that little frosted bathroom window of old Dan's, and let the end drop down into the alley, past the window of the playwright straight below.
It was another way out, if necessary, if the stairs down should be blocked. He estimated that the chances were not one in a thousand that he would not be able to get out of the building down the stairs and clear away before the bang of a shot in the upstairs of the old tenement would rouse anyone. Still it was better, as he had found, to have a way out. Always one possible way.
He had paid the rope out. It reached down to the alley, or near it. The shade had been replaced at the window below again. The man inside could not see it.
Tuxedo Johnny Blythe went down the ladder again from the roof. He went quietly along the hall to that rear flat, and through the door that had no lock. He went down the long black railroad hall, to the door of the room halfway in back.
He listened without a breath. He heard the rustle of a sheet of paper being crumpled and thrown to the floor. He heard the brief momentary sharpening of a pencil—snick-snick-snick. He heard the creak of chair legs as the man in there shifted position slightly. He heard the smallest sounds—to the pounding of his own heart. The man in there could hear no sound. He would never know what had hit him.
Gripping the gun in his pocket Tuxedo Johnny opened the door.
He watched carefully.
The big man sat at his table across the room, beside the shaded window, beneath the bright bulb hanging from the ceiling, writing and writing on. He was out of this world. He was nowhere. A man could walk right up behind his shoulder, and he would not know it.
Still with a soft quiet step Tuxedo Johnny put a foot across the threshold. The big deaf man with the bland mild face made a sudden gesture as if to push his chair back, or turn around.
From the threshold the killer fired straightway . . .
'CURTAIN,' Kerry Ott had wr
itten, jabbing his pencil down.
Putting a period to the play. The thing was finished. He eased his shoulders back with a relaxing gesture. It was a movement purely involuntary and reflexive, which contained in it the split second, the inch of life, for the man who had fired that gun had a steady hand and eye. Diagonally beside him the wall spouted plaster dust from a hole suddenly bored there. In the silence in which he dwelt.
He was not quite the bland sophisticated type that he aspired to be, nor even completely the inspired man-of-letters type which he appeared to be; and no doubt there would always be many subtle civilized situations where his large and somewhat ungainly presence would be at a loss. But he had a more primitive type of awareness than a bland sophisticated man or an inspired literary man may be supposed to possess. For he had come from the Ozarks, from a feud country, and he knew what bark means when it flies from a tree or plaster from a wall.
His reaction was something more than instantaneous, hurling his body to one side, gripping the back of the chair behind him and swinging it above. He hit the floor and rolled as the light above him went out in a shower of shattered bulb glass, struck by the chair legs, with the wood in his grip splitting to the blast of the second shot.
He saw the flash of the third shot in the blackness as the killer came rushing at him, firing. He was no longer the maker of plays, out of this world, in spaces unwalled and timeless. He was in this little room, in quick and black reality. He had respect for a gun—in the hand of a madman all the more.
He killed O'Brien! the thought flashed to him. No! O'Brien didn't get it! No one knows. If he kills me, he's safe!
There was only the blackness, and the thudding rush of the killer's feet towards him. The vibrancy of a voice, with oaths or threats or triumph that he could not hear. He was on hands and knees. He hurled himself in a blind silent tackle, as a flash streaked at him again and his right arm went numb with the anodyne of shock which blots out pain.
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