There was silence for a moment. I felt my leg twitch and jerk, uncontrollably. Vivian said: “Hurry up. He’s coming to, again.”
I lay very still. I got cramped from the huddled position they’d let my limp figure fall into. But I didn’t move again.
“His wrists,” Vivian said, “We can break a glass. A sharp piece of glass and cut the veins in his wrists.”
Smitty thought about that. I got afraid they would hear the thunder of my heart, know I was listening. Then Smitty said: “No. First place, the police would wonder about him being all bruised up. Going out the window, that wouldn’t have been noticed or thought anything of. Besides, the bleeding would take too long. We’ll wait. That cop’s got to leave sometime.”
It came to me quite clearly, then, what I had to do. I didn’t like the idea. I wasn’t brave about it. I just didn’t have any choice. It came to me that as far as they were concerned, I was already dead. There was no question but what they were going to kill me, by one method or another, sooner or later. They had to.
Knowing that I was going to die, anyhow, I suddenly knew that I’d make it as tough as possible for them, at least make a fight for it. Being shot wouldn’t be any worse than being tossed out that window. I braced both hands against the wall and lunged away from it, scrabbled to my feet, staggering back away from them. I was weak and trembling. Both Vivian and Smitty looked at me in surprise. Vivian still held the gun.
“Well,” Smitty said. “Snookums woke up.” He put his hands in his pockets, took out the rolls of nickels. “I’ll have to rock him off to sleep again.”
I started backing away, slowly, toward the door. I saw Vivian raise the revolver, saw her fingers tighten, whiten, around it. I heard Smitty say: “Don’t use that gun. We don’t have to. The radio’s off. They’d hear a shot all through the hotel. And there’d be no powder burns. It wouldn’t look like suicide. I’ll take care of him.”
He came at me fast, half running. I whirled and got to the corner of the room where it turned into the hall leading to the door. I stopped and swung around again. He was almost on me and his own momentum was too much for him to stop. I hit him. I swung with all my might, from the knees. The blow smashed into his cheeks. But nothing happened. He just swayed and looked at me with a sort of puzzled look in those wide-set, level gray eyes. I knew then that I was too weak to hurt him much.
I knew then that this was going to be like a dream I often had, where I was fighting somebody and I kept hitting them, hitting them, but nothing happened and they didn’t seem to be hurt. They’d keep laughing at me. This was going to be like that. For one crazy moment I thought that maybe all this was just part of some nightmare. Maybe I’d awaken any moment and find myself at home in bed, with Fran curled up warmly beside me.
Then I heard Vivian say: “Get out of the way, Smitty. I’ve got to shoot him. We can’t let him get away!” She sounded hysterical.
That was when I swung again. This time my fist hit Smitty on the point of the jaw and he staggered backward until his legs hit the edge of the bed and he sat down on it. I went down the hall toward the door, sprinting. I got the door open and looked back and saw Vivian turn the corner of the room and level the gun at me. The door slammed shut, blocking off the picture of that snarling, feline face of hers. I didn’t think of direction. I just turned to the left and ran and turned a corner of the hall and saw ahead of me on the right a door marked Fire Exit. I went through it and stopped. If they came after me, they’d assume that I’d gone down the stairs. So I went up. I went up two flights, three steps at a time, on my tiptoes, making as little noise as possible. At the top, I sprawled, exhausted, against the wall and listened. There was no sound from the fire stairs at all. Only the sound of my own labored breathing.
I went through into the sixteenth floor hallway, made my way to the elevator, rang the bell. It seemed like hours before the indicator crawled up to fourteen. I held my breath to see if it would stop there. It didn’t. It came on up to sixteen. The elevator operator, a middle-aged man with a hawk nose and glasses, peered at me curiously as I got in.
“Listen,” I said. “If you get a buzz at the fourteenth floor, don’t stop. Please. It – it’s a matter of life and death.”
I looked at the indicator bank and so did he. We both saw there was no signal to stop at fourteen. I leaned against the wall of the elevator and for the first time became really aware of the throbbing aches in my ribs and kidneys and at my left temple. There was a welt there from Smitty’s knuckles. I took out a handkerchief and wet it with my tongue, wiped some of the blood away from my lips. There wasn’t much. My lip was cut on the inside, was a little puffy.
“What happened?” the operator asked. He looked at me with that curious but unemotional expression that spectators at an accident always have.
“I–I had some trouble, that’s all,” I said. Sure. Just some trouble. Beaten up, almost thrown out of a window, but for the intervention of some kind providence. I got to trembling again, thinking about it.
The elevator reached the main floor and I walked, wobbledy-legged, across the lobby to the desk. The clerk, a needle-thin man with great horned-framed glasses and a pointed nose said, “Yes, sir?” without hardly looking at me.
I took a deep breath. Down here in the brightly lighted, rather ancient and shoddy austerity of this hotel lobby, what I was going to have to say would sound melodramatic, ridiculous. I said. “You’d better send the house officer up to room fourteen-o-nine. I just escaped from there after being beaten up and robbed and almost killed. I—”
I stopped. A sickening shock went through me. I had forgotten that letter of confession I’d signed. Smitty and Vivian still had that. I looked up at the desk clerk again. He was peering at me as though I’d just crawled out of the woodwork. “Are you – uh – sure, sir?” he said.
“Look.” I took out my blood-smeared handkerchief and showed it to him. I curled back my upper lip with one finger so he could see the cut there. I pointed to my temple and the lump right in front of my ear. I said: “A girl accosted me here in the lobby and forced me up to her room at gunpoint. There was a man there and he—”
“Here in this lobby?” the clerk cut in. “What room was this, sir?”
I told him. I got sore. “Are you going to send the house dick up there or do I have to call outside police? I want you to hurry. They’ve probably left that room already as it is. But check it anyhow. And they can’t get out of this hotel without my seeing them. I’ll stay here with a cop until they do try to get out.”
The desk clerk was looking over his file card. “Room fourteen-o-nine,” he said. “We don’t have a girl registered for that room. It – well – I suppose it could be a girl. The name is K. Morgan. No baggage. Paid one day, in advance.”
“Morgan,” I repeated after him. “That’s my name. Let me see the registry.”
He showed it to me. The signature was a reasonable facsimile of my own.
They hadn’t made any mistake. They’d registered the room in my name. It would look like I’d taken it with the express purpose of leaping fom the window, killing myself. At the same time I realized that they probably had another room of their own, on the same floor, that they could flee to, hide out in, if anything went wrong.
“Do you remember what the person looked like who registered for that room?” I said.
The clerk shook his head, looked at the registration. “Whoever it was, signed in at noon. I didn’t come on until four P.M.”