It gave Joey a moment. Gravity and his feet sent him hurtling down the hillside, into the undergrowth. But Dorrell still had the light and the gun and Joey thought: “He knows he’s got to get me. If I get away it’s his neck as an accessory to murder. He’s desperate. He’s got to get me...”
Joey rolled behind the rough bole of an oak. His fingers found a smooth sandstone, half the size of a brick. A stone against a flashlight and gun. He lay a moment, listening.
Dorrell was charging crazily down the hill. Berserk, he shouted, “Come back, you fool! You’ll never get away. I got the gun. I can see where...” He fired twice, and Joey knew Dorrell was shooting at shadows, any kind of shadow, wallowing through the undergrowth.
Joey raised himself to his knees, his feet, the stone clutched in his fingers.
Dorrell fired at the crashing stone. Then his light swung, blinding Joey as he bunched himself and sprang for the undergrowth below the oak.
Mouthing laughter, Dorrell came after him, holding his fire now, his light catching Joey only fleetingly through the brush, waiting until he had Joey out of the timber, limned against the river.
Then Joey heard the gun fire once more, scant yards behind him. It sounded muffled, and the sounds of Dorrell’s reckless charge ceased.
Joey paused, the silence beating against his ear drums, sudden, deep. The flashlight had gone out. Joey turned cautiously, staring at the brush, his gaze moving until it reached the moonlit spot where it stopped. Joey saw the gnarled root that had tripped Dorrell in his headlong plunge, the way Dorrell’s hand had twisted, burying the muzzle of the gun in his throat. Dorrell’s blood gleamed like crimson satin in the moonlight. Joey knew he was dead.
He stood a moment, chilled by death. Then he dug his toes in and started back up the long, silent hill-side. If there was a lead to Cora, he felt, it had to be on the scene of the crime; where she’d been snatched. In his store.
Joey pulled Dorrell’s car in the alley, up near the rear entrance of the store. He sat a moment, wondering if the police stake-out had become impatient. But he saw no signs of the place being filled with police buzzing about the rediscovered body of Marge Krayer. He got out of the car, entered the store-room.
Marge Krayer hadn’t been moved. Everything was the same. The lights still burned out front, turned on, he knew, by Cora at the first approaches of dusk. If his time element fitted, it had been just about the last thing she’d done.
He walked through the store-room, down the shop between the high racks of books. At the front door he scanned the, street. Across the street, three doors down, he could see the dim shadow. It wouldn’t be Crenshaw now; some other cop would be on duty, but it was a cop just the same, watching Joey’s car at the southern mouth of the alley and the lighted store like a man of stone. Book work, Joey thought. He thinks I’ve been in back the past hour and a quarter, doing book work.
Joey stretched, spreading his arms out wide in an elaborate gesture, the movements of a man who might have been over a desk for more than an hour; he knew he was plainly silhouetted against the glass door to the cop.
He turned and strolled back down the length of the store. He bent over the mussed, twisted magazines where Cora had struggled, his hands shaking. Nothing. Nothing but magazines. He pushed the counter out further, knowing the cop couldn’t see this deep into the store, from across the street and three doors down. The movement was jerky. A tottering stack of books fell down from the other end of the counter to the floor. With a crash.
Joey wiped his coat sleeve across his face. He bent once more, began spreading the magazines.
Then he heard the scratchings, counted them, listened to the pause, heard the scratchings on the ceiling renew. It felt as if every hair were marching across his scalp. A scene in his book, Corpse In The House, a scene he had himself created in his mind, was coming to life. The woman walled in the alcove, the man downstairs, hearing the scratchings on the ceiling, reminding him he had murdered her on the third day of the third month. Only this time it was not a murderer listening. Joey stood with his hands clenched, his head tilted back, his mouth slightly open, counting the faltering sounds. Three scratches... a pause... three scratches...
He went back in the storage room, opened the rear stairway door that led up to Ralph Ballinger’s flat. The stairs were narrow and dark before him. He started up, silent, and it seemed as if the darkness were alive about him.
The doorway at the top opened into Ballinger’s kitchen, though Joey knew the red-headed, densely freckled man did no cooking and hired none done.
Joey moved across the kitchen, furniture looming in the glow from the corner street light that filtered in. He heard nothing but those faint scratching sounds, guiding him. He reached a closet door, flung it open. He heard her breathing, saw her huddled form below Ballinger’s hanging suite. He dropped to his knees, tore the gag and bonds away. When he’d helped her to her feet, she clung to him, small, warm, sobbing.
“Joey! I... I was... afraid... you wouldn’t understand the sounds or hear me. I could hear you walking around down there and the only way I could think of getting you up here...”
“...Came out of the book,” Joey supplied softly. “Sure, hon. You did most of the typing, listened to me read passages back every time I reworked one. I knew...”
He and Cora whirled as a switch clicked, splashing light over the room. A man stood in the corner, one hand still on the light switch, the other hand holding a gun. There was murder in the set of his mouth, the light in his eyes.
It was Arnheit.
But Arnheit did not look like a book-lover, a man who went to bat for the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Not now. He looked wizened and incredibly old and evil. “I was watching from the back window when Dorrell’s car came in the alley,” Arnheit said. “I thought it was Dorrell returning from his task with you; then you got out and I saw it wasn’t. I let her think I’d gone, hoping she’d manage to get you up here, Joey.”
“Dorrell made a mistake or two,” Joey said.
“So I see,” Arnheit nodded. “But it will turn out just as well, if not better. A half million to spend by myself, browsing in book stores all over the country,” he smiled mirthlessly.
“No,” Cora breathed, “they’ll get you. You knew that Ballinger left his flat every day at five sharp. You thought you’d be safe in bringing me up here until you could decide what to do with me, after you murdered Marge Krayer. You knew that Ballinger had gone, that the flat would be vacant until tomorrow morning. You had little choice anyway but to bring me up the back stairs and hide me here. You were almost cornered. You couldn’t lug an unconscious girl all over town.”
“I should have killed you,” Arnheit told her. “and Joey as well and given your bodies to Dorrell. Perhaps he could have at least succeeded in getting rid of you then.” His gaze dropped back to Joey, a twisted smile on his old, wrinkled mouth. “When you write your next book, Joey, don’t work on the assumption that murder gets easier. It never does. I was a fool. I hesitated because murder and murder added to it was becoming so devilishly hard. You know why I killed Marge?”
Joey nodded. “I think I know everything now. You had Dorrell and Marge come in the store this morning to create a scene and give you a chance to plant the book with the thousand dollar bill in it. Several people in the store also made me uncertain where the book had come from. You’ve held that half million until it was searing the skin off your fingers. You had to know if you could spend it in safety. When the police go out and pick up Dorrell’s body and break you down and find that loot you’ve got hidden away, they’ll tie up the angles. Arnheit, all of them. It took a brain like yours to cook up that armored truck robbery in the first place. Arnheit.”