“Okay, Wayne, I’ll have one too,” Hans said. “Excuse me a moment.”
He went out into the kitchen. I took a quick look into the bathroom and then went into the bedroom and took a good look, even under the bed. Lamb wasn’t there. Then I went into the kitchen and said, “Forgot to tell you, make mine light. I might want to paint a bit after I get home.”
“Sure,” he said.
Lamb wasn’t in the kitchen. Nor had she left after I’d knocked or come in; I remember Hans’s kitchen door; it’s pretty noisy and I hadn’t heard it. And it’s the only door aside from the front one.
I’d been foolish.
Unless, of course, Lamb had been here and had gone away with the Chandlers when they’d dropped by to warn them, if they had dropped by.
I went back into the big studio with the skylight and wandered around for a minute looking at the things on the walls. They made me want to puke, so I sat down and waited. I’d stay at least a few minutes to make it look all right. Hans came back.
He gave me my drink and I thanked him. I sipped it while he waited patronizingly. Not that I minded that. He made money and I didn’t. But I thought worse of him than he could possibly think of me.
“How’s your work going, Wayne?”
“Fine,” I said. I sipped my drink. He’d taken me at my word and made it weak, mostly vermouth. It tasted lousy that way. But the olive in it looked darker, more the color I’d had in mind. Maybe, just maybe, with the picture built around that color, it would work out.
“Nice place, Hans,” I said. “That skylight. I wish I had one.”
He shrugged. “You don’t work from models anyway, do you? And outdoors is outdoors.”
“Outdoors is in your mind,” I said. “There isn’t any difference.” And then I wondered why I was talking to somebody who wouldn’t know what I was talking about. I wandered over to the window—the one that faced toward my studio—and looked out of it. I hoped I’d see Lamb on the way there, but I didn’t. She wasn’t here. Where was she? Even if she’d been here and left when I’d knocked, she’d have been on the way now. I’d have seen her.
I turned. “Were the Chandlers here tonight?” I asked him.
“The Chandlers? No; haven’t seen them for a couple of days.” He’d finished his drink. “Have another?” he asked.
I started to say no. I didn’t. My eyes happened, just happened, to light on a closet door. I’d seen inside it once; it wasn’t deep, but it was deep enough for a man to stand inside it. Or a woman.
“Thanks, Hans. Yes.”
I walked over and handed him my glass. He went out into the kitchen with the glasses. I walked quietly over to the closet door and tried it.
It was locked.
And there wasn’t a key in the door. That didn’t make sense. Why would anyone keep a closet locked when he always locked all the outer doors and windows when he left?
Little lamb, who made thee?
Hans came out of the kitchen, a martini in each hand. He saw my hand on the knob of the closet door.
For a moment he stood very still and then his hands began to tremble; the martinis, his and mine, slopped over the rims and made little droplets falling to the floor.
I asked him, pleasantly, “Hans, do you keep your closet locked?”
“Is it locked? No, I don’t, ordinarily.” And then he realized he hadn’t quite said it right, and he said, more fearlessly. “What’s the matter with you, Wayne?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all.” I took the forty-five out of my pocket. He was far enough away so that, big as he was, he couldn’t think about trying to jump me.
I smiled at him instead. “How’s about letting me have the key?”
More martini glistened on the tiles. These tall, big, handsome blonds, they haven’t guts; he was scared stiff. He tried to make his voice normal. “I don’t know where it is. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said. “But stay where you are. Don’t move, Hans.”
He didn’t. The glasses shook, but the olives stayed in them. Barely. I watched him, but I put the muzzle of the big forty-five against the keyhole. I slanted it away from the center of the door so I wouldn’t kill anybody who was hiding inside. I did that out of the corner of my eye, watching Hans Wagner.
I pulled the trigger. The sound of the shot, even in that big studio, was deafening, but I didn’t take my eyes off Hans. I may have blinked.
I stepped back as the closet door swung slowly open. I lined the muzzle of the forty-five against Hans’s heart. I kept it there as the door of the closet swung slowly toward me.
An olive hit the tiles with a sound that wouldn’t have been audible, ordinarily. I watched Hans while I looked into the closet as the door swung fully open.
Lamb was there. Naked.
I shot Hans and my hand was steady, so one shot was enough. He fell with his hand moving toward his heart but not having time to get there. His head hit the tiles with a crushing sound. The sound was the sound of death.
I put the gun back into my pocket and my hand was trembling now.
Hans’s easel was near me, his palette knife lying on the ledge.
I took the palette knife in my hand and cut my Lamb, my naked Lamb, out of her frame. I rolled her up and held her tightly; no one would ever see her thus. We left together and, hand in hand, started up the hill toward home. I looked at her in the bright moonlight. I laughed and she laughed, but her laughter was like silver cymbals and my laughter was like dead petals shaken from a madman’s geranium.
Her hand slipped out of mine and she danced, a white slim wraith.
Back over her shoulder her laughter tinkled and she said, “Remember, darling? Remember that you killed me when I told you about Hans and me? Don’t you remember killing me this afternoon? Don’t you, darling? Don’t you remember?”
The Last Train
It was never a question of taking a later train…
ELIOT HAIG sat alone at a bar, as he had sat alone at many bars before, and outside it was dusk, a peculiar dusk. Inside the tavern it was dim and shadowy, almost darker than outside. The blue back bar mirror heightened the effect; in it Haig seemed to see himself as in dim moonlight from a blue moon. Dimly but clearly he saw himself; not doable, despite the several drinks he had had, but single.
Very, very single.
And as always when he had been drinking a few hours he thought, maybe this time I’ll do it.
The it was vague and big; it meant everything. It meant making the big jump from one life to another life that he had so long contemplated: It meant simply walking out on a moderately successful semi-shyster lawyer named Eliot Haig, walking out on all the petty complications of his life, on the personal involvements, the legal chicanery that was just inside the letter of the law or indetectably outside; it meant cutting the cable of habit that tied him to an existence that had become without meaning or significance or incentive.
The blue reflection depressed him and he felt, more strongly than usual, the need to move, to go somewhere else if only for another drink. He finished the last sip of his highball and slid off the stool to the solid floor.
He said, “So long, Joe,” and strolled toward the front.
The bartender said, “Must be a big fire somewhere; look at that sky. Wonder if it’s the lumber yards other side of town.” The bartender was leaning to the front window, staring out and up.
Haig looked up after he had gone through the door. The sky was a pinkish ‘ gray, as though with the glow of a distant fire. But it covered all of the sky he could see from where he stood, with no clue to the direction of the conflagration.