She laughed just before she shot him.
She shot him four times, in the lower belly, then the hammer clicked. She threw the gun at his face and rolled away from him.
He stepped over her without touching her. His big pale face was quite empty for a moment, then it settled into stiff lines of torture, lines that seemed to have been there always.
He walked erectly along the rug towards the front door. I jumped for the big Colt and got it. To keep it from the woman. At the fourth step he took, blood showed on the yellowish nap of the rug. After that it showed at every step he took.
He reached the door and put his big hand flat against the wood and leaned there for a moment. Then he shook his head and turned back. His hand left a bloody smear on the door from where he had been holding his belly.
He sat down in the first chair he came to and leaned forward and held himself tightly with his hands. The blood came between his fingers slowly, like water from an overflowing basin.
«Them little slugs,» he said, «hurt just like the big ones, down below anyways.»
The dark woman walked towards him like a marionette. He watched her come unblinkingly, under his half-lowered, heavy lids.
When she got close enough she leaned over and spat in his face.
He didn’t move. His eyes didn’t change. I jumped for her and threw her into a chair. I wasn’t nice about it.
«Leave her alone,» he grunted at me. «Maybe she loved the guy.»
Nobody tried to stop me from telephoning this time.
Hours later I sat on a red stool at Lucca’s, at Fifth and Western, and sipped a martini and wondered how it felt to be mixing them all day and never drink one.
I took another martini over and ordered a meal. I guess I ate it. It was late, past one, Skalla was in the prison ward of the General Hospital. Miss Baring hadn’t showed up yet, but they knew she would, as soon as she heard Skalla was under glass, and no longer dangerous.
KLBL, who didn’t know anything about it at first, had got a nice hush working. They were to have twenty-four clear hours to decide how to release the story.
Lucca’s was almost as full as at noon. After a while an Italian brunette with a grand nose and eyes you wouldn’t fool with came over and said: «I have a table for you now.»
My imagination put Skalla across the table from me. His flat black eyes had something in them that was more than mere pain, something he wanted me to do. Part of the time he was trying to tell me what it was, and part of the time he was holding his belly in one piece and saying again: «Leave her alone, Maybe she loved the guy.»
I left there and drove north to Franklin and over Franklin to Beachwood and up to Heather Street. It wasn’t staked. They were that sure of her.
I drifted along the street below and looked up the scrubby slope spattered with moonlight and showing her house from behind as if it were three stories high. I could see the metal brackets that supported the porch. They looked high enough off the ground so that a man would need a balloon to reach them. But there was where he had gone up. Always the hard way with him.
He could have run away and had a fight for his money or even bought himself a place to live up in. There were plenty of people in the business, and they wouldn’t fool with Skalla. But he had come back instead to climb her balcony, like Romeo, and get his stomach full of slugs. From the wrong woman, as usual.
I drove around a white curve that looked like moonlight itself and parked and walked up the hill the rest of the way. I carried a flash, but I didn’t need it to see there was nobody on the doorstep waiting for the milk. I didn’t go in the front way. There might just happen to be some snooper with night glasses up on the hill.
I sneaked up the bank from behind, between the house and the empty garage. I found a window I could reach and made not much noise breaking it with a gun inside my hat. Nothing happened except that the crickets and tree frogs stopped for a moment.
I picked a way to the bedroom and prowled my flash around discreetly, after lowering the shades and pulling the drapes across them. The light dropped on a tumbled bed, on daubs of print powder, on cigarette butts on the window sills and heel marks in the nap of the carpet. There was a green and silver toilet set on the dressing table and three suitcases in the closet. There was a built-in bureau back in there with a lock that meant business. I had a chilled-steel screwdriver with me as well as the flash. I jimmied it.
The jewelry wasn’t worth a thousand dollars. Perhaps not half. But it meant a lot to a girl in show business. I put it back where I got it.
The living room had shut windows and a queer, unpleasant, sadistic smell. The law enforcement had taken care of the Vat 69, to make it easier for the fingerprint men. I had to use my own. I got a chair that hadn’t been bled on into a corner, wet my throat and waited in the darkness.
A shade flapped in the basement or somewhere. That made me wet my throat again. Somebody came out of a house half a dozen blocks away and whooped. A door banged. Silence. The tree frogs started again, then the crickets. Then the electric clock on the radio got louder than all the other sounds together.
Then I went to sleep.
When I woke up the moon had gone from the front windows and a car had stopped somewhere. Light, delicate, careful steps separated themselves from the night. They were outside the front door. A key fumbled in the lock.
In the opening door the dim sky showed a head without a hat. The slope of the hill was too dark to outline any more. The door clicked shut.
Steps rustled on the rug. I already had the lamp cord in my fingers. I yanked it and there was light.
The girl didn’t make a sound, not a whisper of sound. She just pointed the gun at me.
I said, «Hello, Beulah.»
She was worth waiting for.
Not too tall, not too short; that girl. She had the long legs that can walk and dance. Her hair even by the light of the one lamp was like a brush fire at night. Her face had laughter wrinkles at the corner of the eyes. Her mouth could laugh.
The features were shadowed and had that drawn look that makes some faces more beautiful because it makes them more delicate. I couldn’t see her eyes. They might have been blue enough to make you jump, but I couldn’t see.
The gun looked about a.32, but had the extreme rightangled grip of a Mauser.
After a while she said very softly, «Police, I suppose.»
She had a nice voice, too. I still think of it, at times.
I said, «Let’s sit down and talk. We’re all alone here. Ever drink out of the bottle?»
She didn’t answer. She looked down at the gun she was holding, half smiled, shook her head.
«You wouldn’t make two mistakes,» I said. «Not a girl as smart as you are.»
She tucked the gun into the side pocket of a long ulsterlike coat with a military collar.
«Who are you?»
«Just a shamus. Private detective to you. Carmady is the name. Need a lift?»
I held my bottle out. It hadn’t grown to my hand yet. I still had to hold it.
«I don’t drink, Who hired you?»
«KLBL. To protect you from Steve Skalla.»
«So they know,» she said. «So they know about him.»
I digested that and said nothing.
«Who’s been here?» she went on sharply. She was still standing in the middle of the room, with her hands in her coat pockets now, and no hat.
«Everybody but the plumber,» I said. «He’s a little late, as usual.»
«You’re one of those men.» Her nose seemed to curl a little. «Drugstore comics.»
«No,» I said. «Not really. It’s just a way I get talking to the people I have to talk to. Skalla came back again and ran into trouble and got shot up and arrested. He’s in the hospital. Pretty bad.»
She didn’t move. «How bad?»
«He might live if he’d have surgery. Doubtful, even with that. Hopeless without. He has three in the intestines and one in the liver.»