He dropped the butt, squashed it out, and came dutifully over, looking guilty, forefinger flipping a sloppy salute. "Good evening, sir."
"Hi," I said. "Thought Jerry was on tonight."
"Supposed to be, but he called in sick."
"Bad?"
"No ... nothing serious. One of those virus deals."
"Oh. Well, lot of that going around. Good night."
"Good night, sir."
I walked around the bend and punched the UP button on the elevator panel.
Then I stepped back against the wall and got the .45 in my right hand and when the little uniformed bastard came around the corner with the silenced Luger in his fist, I smashed the cold steel of the Colt into his forehead and left one eyeball plastered to his cheek to dangle there and look at me with absolute horror.
Pain-racked reflexes twisted him into me and we both hit the floor next to the gun that had dropped from suddenly nerveless fingers just as the other one came out of the service entrance. He was a big guy with a raincoat and no hat and I could see the huge bulk of the Magnum in his hand, obscenely tipped with a muffler, and I knew it was time to die, because the slugs that rod spat could whip through three people in tandem before they slowed down and my own piece was caught in the folds of a doorman's uniform.
And it would have been time to die if he hadn't used hollow points designed to flatten so they could churn up guts like an eggbeater. That sadistic desire cost him, because each slug was like a fist pounding into the body I held in front of me, hitting without penetrating all the way, and he was trying for a head shot at me when my fingers found the corpse's hand with the Luger and I squeezed off one nine-millimeter phutt that took him in the throat and rocked him into a gurgling death twitch against the door.
For a second I lay there, waiting.
Across the foyer a leg gave an involuntary jerk as muscle tissue died in sequence. A foul intestinal smell hung under the cordite and something was making dripping sounds and it wasn't the rain.
But it was over.
I pushed the body away, making sure the Luger stayed in the lifeless fingers of the guy who didn't know that this was an expensive building with permanent, bonded doormen who only covered for each other, and each had a uniform that didn't have rolled-up pants cuffs or sleeves too long. And who were allowed to smoke on the job if they felt like it.
I found Jerry in the locked mailroom, alive but unconscious, a purple welt behind his ear. Tomorrow he'd have a hell of a story to tell and maybe a few tenants would put another lock on their doors and a couple would move out. Whoever walked in on the mess would have a ball talking into the TV cameras and be a celebrity for a day.
The job was too professional for me to be bothered frisking the bodies. Nothing would be there and I'd only waste time, and get in even deeper. I made sure no blood or gore showed on my clothes, and went back to the street through the rear entrance, ducking under the scope of the remote TV lens that monitored the doorway. I went up the four steps to the sidewalk and turned left.
All was still quiet on the eastern front.
For now.
Velda's place didn't have a doorman, but I had the key and nobody saw me go in. I told her that if any questions were asked, just say I had been there all night.
She didn't bother querying me. Not Velda. Not when something was on. She knew to let me play it out any way I wanted to.
But she did give me one of those sloe-eyed smiles and say, "It's going to cost you, Mike."
Her fingers did something and the transparent yellow cobweb hissed to her feet in a silken puddle and the Velda I loved so much was right there, starting to arch toward me in all that crazy nakedness.
"Get ready to have your strength sapped," she told me.
"I better catch a shower," I said.
"We can start there," she said, and started unbuttoning my shirt.
Chapter Six
IT WAS AN HOUR later before we decided to use the bed for sleeping and at least two hours after that when the phone rang.
Velda sat up, and clicked the nightstand light on. The covers were around her waist and she was nude as a grape and a half-lidded glimpse of those full, lush, unbound breasts was enough to snap me wide awake, if the phone hadn't already.
Even from my side of the bed, the imperative but trying-too-hard-to-be-casual voice could easily be heard, apologizing for the late call, and asking Velda if she knew where I could be reached on an urgent matter.
She nudged me and said in a sleepy tone that didn't go with her alert expression, "Why, yes—yes, he's right here. ..."
Before she could hand me the phone, the voice chuckled, like one old friend catching another in the act, and said with a laughing inflection, "Don't tell me he's been there all night?"
She could sure play the game, embarrassed confusion, the stammer and inadvertent confession all in one run-on sentence of, "Uh, yes—that's right, I mean ... well, what business is it of yours if he spent the night with me?"
All the while her shrewd, dark eyes were locked on mine. With her nakedness to distract me, keeping my eyes on hers shows you how seriously we were taking this. And how severely she really had sapped my strength....
She was saying, "Who is this?"
"I'm sorry to have bothered—"
"Here, let me put him on and—"
"No," the commanding voice said. "No, never mind. Thank you, ma'am, and again I apologize for the lateness."
And hung up.
She cradled the phone, propped a pillow, sunk an elbow in it, and rested her chin against a fist, looking at me with tousled accusation.
"Friend of yours?" I asked her lightly.
"Not hardly."
"Oh?"
"I get the occasional middle-of-the-night call from a strange man, but not a wide-awake, sober one, and with a teletype clicking and deep voices in the background."
"Wasn't our friend the captain of Homicide?"
"No. I'd like to have let you give that character your own performance." Her eyes narrowed. "Offhand, I'd say that was the esteemed Vance Traynor."
"Oh, laughing boy from the D.A.'s office. He must be riding Pat's back again." I let out my own chuckle. "I wonder if he had to run Pat down and shake him out of Helen DiVay's bed."
She arched an eyebrow at me. "You really think Pat was up to that challenge?"
"No."
She reached over and clicked off the bedside lamp and yanked the covers up and said, "Turn the other way."
I turned the other way and she snuggled herself against me.
I was enjoying that warmth and the darkness, and the near silence of Manhattan after midnight where even the occasional muffled siren had a dreamlike quality.
Then she whispered, "Mike—don't keep secrets from a girl. Who did you kill this time?"
I reached behind me to trace the smooth rise of her hip. "Nobody you know, sugar."
The warmth and the silence began lulling me again. Then I realized her lips were near my ear.
"Want to try killing me? With kindness maybe?"
"That might take two or three weeks."
"What's time anyway?" she said, and she was crawling on top of me.
Where was a can of spinach when you needed it?
The morning papers and early TV shows headlined the gruesome find in my apartment-house lobby with a publicity-conscious fat woman giving the vivid details of how she had stumbled over the corpses after returning home from a party at her son-in-law's.