“If you’ll just turn around slowly, Mister Smith, you’ll feel ever so much better.”
Caughlin stepped out from the crack between buildings and walked with his stiff head held straight, facing front. He walked to the hamburger place and said, “You should follow me.”
Run. Put the scream of fear into a very fast run . . . That was how much everything broke in on Jordan, as if nothing good had ever happened before and nothing good was hoped for in any future . . .
“Wait,” he said and grabbed for Caughlin’s arm. Caughlin stopped immediately and tried to smile Jordan’s motion away.
“You son of a bitch,” said Jordan. “What? What happened?”
“We should go into the restaurant so that . . .”
“I’m going to kill you bone by bone, old man, bone by bone if you’re double-crossing me—”
“Jordan, please. It’s more complicated than that.”
“We’re going to your basement, old man.”
“That is precisely, Jordan, precisely why I am here. To tell you about that. And you must get off the street.”
Jordan let go of the arm and when he looked down the dark street he realized that he himself stood in a bright shaft of light. He pulled Caughlin again, away from the door and into the shadow. Caughlin talked now without being pressed any more.
“They’re in the street,” he said, “and I think it’s for you.”
Jordan looked and saw nothing. Then he saw a car pull away from the curb at the end of the block, pull away slowly, and the lights going on only later. But the car was going away, not coming closer.
“You don’t mind being seen,” said Caughlin, “but they do.”
“More,” said Jordan. “Tell me more.”
“It’s very complicated. You can let go my arm.” But Jordan did not and Caughlin tried again. “It has to do with raising the ante.”
“You said four thousand. If you . . .”
“I know. It didn’t work.”
“We’re going to the basement.”
“No. I’m trying to tell you, by way of help, if you can believe that . . .”
“I want the paper, old man, I must have the paper!”
“The double-cross is,” Caughlin tried again, “that by way of double-crossing me in a matter of business, there’s a stakeout for you which I am trying to counteract, counter-cross if you wish, as a pure matter of ethics and because you’re my only true paying customer, though that isn’t the whole . . .”
“Who? Who is there?”
“How redundant . . .”
“They’re all dead, except you.”
“Meyer knows,” said Caughlin, and Jordan, with a great, sudden tiredness thought how wrong he had been that last time.
The between-time idleness job. What a strange, wrong thing to have done. Like a—like a killer. Jordan felt ill and leaned by the wall.
“Now, the point I was delicately trying . . .”
“The paper,” said Jordan. “Come on.”
Or Jordan the provider, even he would not be worth anything any more, without the paper to make Smith.
This has got to be, got to be; he kept going on, and pulled the old man down the street.
“This one,” said Caughlin and stopped by the big door which showed the bulb in back over the elevator and the narrow hall leading there.
“The basement door you showed me is down the alley.”
“I should want to check first, Jordan. For heaven’s sake, if I were you . . .”
“All right, all right—”
Caughlin kept knocking on the glass door for a while till a man came out of the lighted elevator. He limped and kept craning his neck to wake up. When he stopped by the door and saw Caughlin, he kept craning a while and then opened up. “I thought you was downstairs. Ain’t you supposed to be watching the furnace?”
“It’s summer time,” said Caughlin and went in.
“I meant was, ain’t you supposed to be watching the blowers because of that air-conditioning trouble up on the third?”
“Yes, yes, yes.”
“And why ain’t you using the back way, like you’re supposed to?”
“Door slammed shut.”
They all went down the hall, to the lighted elevator. “And who’s this here? You know you ain’t supposed . . .”
“Air-conditioning expert.” Caughlin looked at Jordan and said, “Good, huh?”
“You mean you gonna take the elevator? Why don’t you . . .”
“How I hate a whiny old man,” and Caughlin took Jordan past the elevator to the back stairs. “Sometime when you have nothing to do, Jordan, why don’t you, just between times . . .”
“Damn you, shut up!”
The door to the staircase hissed a little when it swung back and Caughlin took Jordan one flight up. “While I go and check,” he said, “I’ll leave you . . .”
“Wait a minute.”
“Jordan. Please. You’re worth four thousand dollars.”
“Three-five, Caughlin.”
“Why, of course, three-five. And as a token of my you-know-what,” he put his hand into his pocket and took out a card. “A beauty, isn’t it?”
It was a bona-fide driver’s license, state of New York, for Samuel Smith with a local address. “Take it.”
Jordan took it. “I need that other paper,” he said.
“Now you admire this while I go and check,” and Caughlin left Jordan in the dark, first-floor corridor where a firm had fixed easy chairs, scenic photos, and its advertising in a restful manner. Jordan watched the door hush shut and sat in the dark with his hand on his belt. In a while, because of the long wait, he pulled the Magnum out and held it.
Caughlin did not go all the way down to the basement. He stopped on the ground-floor landing where the pay phone hung on the wall and dialed his number again. Meyer, he felt, should have his one more chance.
Meyer, said Sherman, had gone to bed, and when that and some questions did not stir the old man into any worthwhile talking, Sherman said, go to hell, the deal’s off, and he should go to bed too.
Caughlin drew his resigned conclusion, looked down the wall to the basement door, and then sighed. I’m a coward, he said, and why change now? He went to get Jordan then, so that they could go to the basement.
“There’s nobody down there,” he said. “Come along.”
“How do you know? Just by walking in?”
“The truth is, I didn’t even walk in. I called my informant and got the all clear.”
“You’re scared.”
“I know. Are you?”
“Yes,” said Jordan, and though it shook Caughlin and made him gape it was now too late for anything else because they were down at the door. “I want the paper,” Jordan said again, and Caughlin pulled open the metal door.
One of the air-conditioning motors was humming. “Usually,” said Caughlin, “the light by the furnace . . .”
At that point, he got shot.
Caughlin spun and pitched into the railing which ran down the cellar stairs and Jordan tossed himself flat on the floor. He heard, “Got the wrong one—” and then, “but I think both of them—” He did not listen to all of it because he spun on the floor where he lay halfway through the basement door and with a hip shot blew out the bulb back of him in the stair well.
Now both sides were in the dark.
The motor hummed and it took him a while to hear anything else. And then I’m going to get the paper . . . He then heard a short scuffle which was way in the basement and while that went on Jordan got off the floor. He stood up on the cellar landing and let the door hiss shut behind him.
There was a useless shot, because Jordan was no longer in line with the door. While the shot still twanged back and forth on the concrete, Jordan bumped into the fire extinguisher next to the door. He yanked it off the hook.
“Hey—” someone said in the basement. “Hey, you think he’s still here?”
Jordan spun the wheel on th
e extinguisher and tossed the cylinder off the landing. When it bounced into the basement the sound was a fright.
Two quick shots, useless.
Then the thing lay there in the dark and just hissed.
Jordan said nothing, the two down in the basement said nothing.
“Hey—” and then, “Jeesis in heaven what is it?”
“I don’t know. Just shut up, I don’t know—”
After that Jordan told them, “It takes about one minute. If you think you got the guts, put out that fuse.” The thing lay there in the dark and hissed.
“—Fuse?”
“Shut up,” said the other one. “Shut up, shut up—”
“Forty seconds maybe,” said Jordan.
It hissed.
“Hey . . . Hey, you up there!”
“Thirty maybe.”
“Hey you up there, you’re Jordan, ain’t you Jordan?”
“What good will it do you?” said Jordan. He licked his lips in the dark and wiped his free hand.
The hiss changed then, because the pressure was going down.
“For godssake answer up there, will you please?”
“Turn the light on,” said Jordan, “and I’ll stop the fuse.”
“Okay. Now hold . . .”
“You shut up you shut up,” said the other one.
“Fifteen and Geronimo,” said Jordan.
“Wait!”
“Toss your guns where I can hear them clatter,” said Jordan.
One clattered, by the foot of the basement stairs, the other one didn’t. The other one fell on top of the dead Caughlin, but Jordan knew it was there.
“Okay, you got them. Now just hold it, Jordan, do you hear?”
Jordan got ready to see in the sudden light, and the bulb went on.
There was a big, foamy puddle of white on the floor and the fire extinguisher in it, still burbling a little. The two men in the light were just staring. It gave Jordan good time to come down the short stairs, and as soon as he was there he shot first one and then the other. They both got identical holes in the forehead and were dead when they hit the floor. And then the rush was on Jordan again and he jumped over the men and ran to the back of the furnace. Back there. Caughlin’s door was locked.
Reason had nothing to do with it, just a wish strong as his will. He pulled, wrenched, rattled the door and said hoarse things. He lost his senses, found them, lost everything he had ever learned, got it all back at the wrong moment, lost one hope after another, turned into worm, rat, idiot, rage, hate splinters, baby panic, a gasp in no air . . .
But he would not go back up the short flight of stairs to where the Caughlin corpse lay, and turn it over and touch it for the key . . .
And then the footsteps came down the other side of the basement door, they went limpedy-limp, and the easiest thing in the world, Jordan thought, when he shows in the door now . . . The old man from the elevator pulled open the door and came in, gaping, standing a split second away from being dead. He made one more limpedy-limp—That’s an idleness standing there, said Jordan, and I know better . . .
One more sick tired drag on the door and Jordan ran. He gave up and ran with mouth open, voiceless, because the wail in him got all used up with the running.
Chapter 20
She said, “My God, Sam! What happened to you?”
He sat down in a chair in the room she had furnished and was ready to tell her what he had meant to do, what he had done instead, how confused it had left him, that she, Betty, was the only thing in all this that had never confused him, and that he thought this is what he had wanted all the time.
Later, he thought, after a breath. What he said was, “Nothing. It’s all right.”
“But—but honey, you looked like you ran all the way.”
“I rented a car,” he said.
She laughed and said she liked his sense of humor. She came over to him and ran her hand through his hair. “You have an accident, Sam?”
“Yes. A real one.”
“Bad, honey?”
“I don’t know yet. But it shook me.”
“Well, you just tell me later,” and she went to the front window where she pulled up the blind. “I didn’t know you were coming, Sammy, or I would have fixed up something. Did you notice the new couch I bought?”
“Close the blind, Betty.”
“Close it?”
“No. Leave it open. So I can look out.” He got up and looked out. He looked across the porch of the bungalow he had rented for her and up and down the street full of late sunshine. No palms here, but there was Spanish tile on the house across and Betty had liked that.
“You don’t want to eat now, do you, Sam? You don’t look . . .”
“No.”
She came over and wanted to lean against him but he changed it into something else, holding her, so she would not lean into the gun.
“You look,” she said, “you look almost a little older, or something.”
“No sleep,” he said. “It’s been very hard sleeping.”
Then she took him into the bedroom and wanted to help him off with his coat. “No,” he said. “I’ll do it,” and she laughed again and said that was just like him, not to accept a little consideration.
“No,” he said, “it’s not that.”
“Not that?”
“I will, in a while,” he said. “But right now I’m not yet done running.”
She did not understand that and laughed this time for that reason. “Sam,” she said. “Look what I bought in the meantime.”
While she went to the chest of drawers, he put the gun in the closet and hung up his jacket there.
“Look. And just today. Just as if I knew you were coming.” She held the fine spun nightgown up and moved it back and forth in the air. “Like it?”
“Yes,” he said. “I like you very much.”
He sat down on the bed and she said, “Oh, Sammy. You’re so tired you don’t know what you’re saying.”
He did not correct her, because he was tired.
“You going to stay a while this time, Sam?”
“Yes. Really.”
“How nice that will be, Sam. How nice.”
“Yes,” he said, and stretched out on the bed.
“You want a nap before eating, don’t you, Sammy.”
“Stay here.”
“If you want me to.”
“Yes. Stay here.”
She sat down on the bed and he laid his hand on her thigh. She put her hand on his and gave it a small push. “You’re not wearing a housecoat,” he said.
“Well, I wasn’t, I mean . . .”
“No, stay here.”
She stayed and then he said she should put on the new nightdress she had bought.
The sun was going outside and part of the time while she undressed he closed his eyes and just heard the sounds she made with cloth against skin. Once a car got louder down the long block, but Jordan was so worn he did not tense till the car had gone by and then he relaxed again.
“I’ll lie down next to you,” she said.
They lay like that and Jordan almost went to sleep. But he did not want to lose knowing that she was there, and the darker it got the more he listened for other things.
She moved against him and he stayed awake. He moved his hand over her and felt her skin in the places where he liked to feel it especially. They lay like that and touched only in a few places and she thought, should I tell him before or should I tell him after. He is so friendly now . . .
“Sam?”
“Don’t move away.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Stay like this, Betty, and I’ll talk to you.”
We’ll talk, she thought, and this is a good time to tell him.
“I tried and I tried,” he said, “but not all of it really came off. It’s mistakes that happened, wrong things along the line, but what I did wrong, Betty, my faults, I mean, they—I don’t know, Betty, I don’t know how to s
ay it . . .”
He said, more, with the worry pushing him, the worry about not being able to keep Smith and Jordan apart, the new awful thing which he had never imagined, but the girl wasn’t listening then. She felt a quick panic.
“Are you trying to tell me you’re married?”
“Married? Hell no,” and he sat up, trying to focus.
She had heard how shrill she had sounded and how it must have struck him. She thought before I lose my courage I must speak. “I remember you said no once before, Sam, but you were acting so strangely, and here I have this important thing, this worry on my mind, and if you say so, Sam, of course I . . .”
“What?”
“I’m going to have a baby.”
He said nothing but she felt his quick move and she panicked again. “I mean, you got to take that into consideration, Sam. You got to remember I sit here all alone and only you know where and I got this worry . . .”
“Baby?”
“Yes.”
“Who says?”
“The doctor said so when I . . .”
“When?”
“Three months now.”
He jumped off the bed and wiped his mouth, staring at her. Dark now in the room. He had talked and asked all the last things from sheer confusion but that was done. Clear now.
“Three months? From me?”
“Sam, Sammy. I didn’t mean—what I meant was, was something else. What . . .”
“Shut up.” I’m rattled, he thought, and then said it, “I’m rattled. Shut up for a minute—”
She lay still and confused and he thought that face there, I have never seen anything emptier. What is there . . . Except for the lie she tried, the lie with the baby . . . One lie in back, that was Sandy; one lie in front, staring empty . . . Easy, try it easy like Jordan does this, and he stepped back almost into the closet. Smith gone now, he thought, but don’t give up Jordan. And no between-time kick, on-the-run kick any more. And my God, he thought—and there was a sound in his throat—what is left now . . .
The light snapped on.
The man nodded his head and nodded the gun at Jordan.
“Wasn’t she supposed to be dead?”
“Sam! He’s got . . .”
She stopped when the killer walked farther into the room, and when Jordan moved over where the killer wanted him.
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