In the narrow dressing room behind the wall bed there was a built-in bureau with a black brush and comb on it and gray hairs in the comb. There was a can of talcum, a flashlight, a crumpled man’s handkerchief, a pad of writing paper, a bank pen and a bottle of ink on a blotter — about what one suitcase would hold in the drawers. The shirts had been bought in a Bay City men’s furnishing store. There was a dark gray suit on a hanger and a pair of black brogues on the floor. In the bathroom there was a safety razor, a tube of brushless cream, some blades, three bamboo toothbrushes in a glass, a few other odds and ends. On the porcelain toilet tank there was a book bound in red cloth — Dorsey’s Why We Behave Like Human Beings. It was marked at page 116 by a rubber band. I had it open and was reading about the Evolution of Earth, Life and Sex when the phone started to ring in the living room.
I snicked off the bathroom light and padded across the carpet to the davenport. The phone was on a stand at one end. It kept on ringing and a horn tooted outside in the street, as if answering it. When it had rung eight times I shrugged and reached for it.
«Pat? Pat Reel?» the voice said.
I didn’t know how Pat Reel would talk. I grunted. The voice at the other end was hard and hoarse at the same time. It sounded like a tough-guy voice.
«Pat?»
«Sure,» I said.
There was silence. It hadn’t gone over. Then the voice said: «This is Harry Matson. Sorry as all hell I can’t make it back tonight. Just one of those things. That bother you much?»
«Sure,» I said.
«What’s that?»
«Sure.»
«Is ’sure’ all the words you know, for God’s sake?»
«I’m a Greek.»
The voice laughed. It seemed pleased with itself.
I said: «What kind of toothbrushes do you use, Harry?»
«Huh?»
This was a startled explosion of breath — not so pleased now.
«Toothbrushes — the little dinguses some people brush their teeth with. What kind do you use?»
«Aw, go to hell.»
«Meet you on the step,» I said.
The voice got mad now. «Listen, smart monkey! You ain’t pulling nothin’, see? We got your name, we got your number, and we got a place to put you if you don’t keep your nose clean, see? And Harry don’t live there any more, ha, ha.»
«You picked him off, huh?»
«I’ll say we picked him off. What do you think we done, took him to a picture show?»
«That’s bad,» I said. «The boss won’t like that.»
I hung up in his face and put the phone down on the table at the end of the davenport and rubbed the back of my neck. I took the door key out of my pocket and polished it on my handkerchief and laid it down carefully on the table. I got up and walked across to one of the windows and pulled the drapes aside far enough to look out into the court. Across its palmdotted oblong, on the same floor level I was on, a bald-headed man sat in the middle of a room under a hard, bright light, and didn’t move a muscle. He didn’t look like a spy.
I let the drapes fall together again and settled my hat on my head and went over and put the lamp out. I put my pocket flash down on the floor and palmed my handkerchief on the doorknob and quietly opened the door.
Braced to the door frame by eight hooked fingers, all but one of which were white as wax, there hung what was left of a man.
He had eyes an eighth of an inch deep, china-blue, wide open. They looked at me but they didn’t see me. He had coarse gray hair on which the smeared blood looked purple. One of his temples was a pulp, and the tracery of blood from it reached clear to the point of his chin. The one straining finger that wasn’t white had been pounded to shreds as far as the second joint. Sharp splinters of bone stuck out of the mangled flesh. Something that might once have been a fingernail looked now like a ragged splinter of glass.
The man wore a brown suit with patch pockets, three of them. They had been torn off and hung at odd angles showing the dark alpaca lining beneath.
He breathed with a faraway unimportant sound, like distant footfalls on dead leaves. His mouth was strained open like a fish’s mouth, and blood bubbled from it. Behind him the hallway was empty as a new-dug grave.
Rubber heels squeaked suddenly on the bare space of wood beside the hall runner. The man’s straining fingers slipped from the door frame and his body started to wind up on his legs. The legs couldn’t hold it. They scissored and the body turned in mid-air, like a swimmer in a wave, and then jumped at me.
I clamped my teeth hard and spread my feet and caught him from behind, after his torso had made a half turn. He weighed enough for two men. I took a step back and nearly went down, took two more and then I had his dragging heels clear of the doorway. I let him down on his side as slowly as I could, crouched over him panting. After a second I straightened, went over to the door and shut and locked it. Then I switched the ceiling light on and started for the telephone.
He’ died before I reached it. I heard the rattle, the spent sigh, then silence. An outfiung hand, the good one, twitched once and the fingers spread out slowly into a loose curve and stayed like that. I went back and felt his carotid artery, digging my fingers in hard. Not a flicker of a pulse. I got a small steel mirror out of my wallet and held it against his open mouth for a long minute. There was no trace of mist on it when I took it away. Harry Matson had come home from his ride.
A key tickled at the outside of the door lock and I moved fast. I was in the bathroom when the door opened, with a gun in my hand and my eyes to the crack of the bathroom door.
This one came in quickly, the way a wise cat goes through a swing door. His eyes flicked up at the ceiling lights, then down at the floor. After that they didn’t move at all. All his big body didn’t move a muscle. He just stood and looked.
He was a big man in an unbuttoned overcoat, as if he had just come in or was just going out. He had a gray felt hat on the back of a thick creamy-white head. He had the heavy black eyebrows and broad pink face of a boss politician, and his mouth looked as if it usually had the smile — but not now. His face was all bone and his mouth jiggled a half-smoked cigar along his lips with a sucking noise.
He put a bunch of keys back in his pocket and said «God!» very softly, over and over again. Then he took a step forward and went down beside the dead man with a slow, clumsy motion. He put large fingers into the man’s neck, took them away again, shook his head, looked slowly around the room. He looked at the bathroom door behind which I was hiding, but nothing changed in his eyes.
«Fresh dead,» he said, a little louder. «Beat to a pulp.»
He straightened up slowly and rocked on his heels. He didn’t like the ceiling light any better than I had. He put the standing lamp on and switched the ceiling light off, rocked on his heels some more. His shadow crawled up the end wall, started across the ceiling, paused and dropped back again. He worked the cigar around in his mouth, dug a match out of his pocket and relit the butt carefully, turning it around and around in the flame. When he blew the match out he put it in his pocket. He did all this without once taking his eyes off the dead man on the floor.
He moved sideways over to the davenport and let himself down on the end of it. The springs squeaked dismally. He reached for the phone without looking at it, eyes still on the dead man.
He had the phone in his hand when it started to ring again. That jarred him. His eyes rolled and his elbows jerked against the sides of his thick overcoated body. Then he grinned very carefully and lifted the phone off the cradle and said in a rich, fruity voice: «Hello Yeah, this is Pat.»