I had to stop watching him come toward me. My eyes swiveled to an electric clock on the dresser. I watched the second hand sweep around, knocking off the remaining seconds of my life. It was quarter to ten. I wondered what Fran was doing. The kids would be in bed. Fran would be out in the kitchen probably, ironing. Or else she’d be watching television in the living room, remembering things about the programs to tell me about when I got home. Or maybe she was over at the Haggards next door, gabbing with Helene, or playing Canasta. When I got home, she’d have the latest community gossip, and she’d brag about how much she’d won from the Haggards . . . When I got home?
Ronny Chernow was only a step away from me, now. Quicksilver seemed to run all through me. The freeze left me. I screamed it: “I’m not going to die! I won’t! I won’t!”
I lunged toward him, slammed into him, knocked him off balance. There was a clicking sound. It wasn’t until long later that I realized the gun had jammed on him, that possibly material of the cushion had caught the hammer or something. Right now I only wondered why didn’t he shoot – get it over with. Why didn’t I hear that muffled clap of sound again and feel the hurt and burn of the bullet striking me, the flood of pain or the nothingness or whatever it was happened when a bullet pumps into your heart and you die.
At the same time, I got halfway past him before he wrenched the gun – from the cushion, tossed the cushion to the floor. I could hear someone shouting, screaming, cursing. For a second I didn’t even realize it was my own voice. Then, as I started toward the door, I looked back. Chernow was right behind me. He had the gun raised. It was a small, nickel-plated revolver. He caught me with the barrel right across the top of the forehead. I went off balance and staggered, crashed against the wall and went down. My eyes wouldn’t focus. The walls and ceiling of the room were tilting, tipping, rolling lazily around and around my head.
As though from a great distance, I heard someone pounding fiercely on the door and rattling the knob. I tried to get to my feet to hold onto the wall. But it kept wheeling away from me. Finally it slowed and stopped. I leaned against that wall, sort of crawled up it and got to my feet. I shook my head, looked around. Liz Tremayne was still on the floor, dead. The nickel-plated revolver was lying near her feet. There was now a terrible thumping, shattering noise coming from the door, outside, leading to the hallway. I looked for Chernow but he wasn’t there.
I walked over and picked up the revolver from the floor. I didn’t have any clear idea why. I was still dazed. But I must have reasoned that I was in danger, needed protection. A gun was protection. Still holding it, I staggered out into the living room, just as the front door of the apartment crashed open and a man half fell inside.
He was short and bull-shouldered. He was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of wrinkled, soiled slacks. His arms were thick and muscular and black with hair. His square-jawed, beetle-browed face looked nervous, hesitant.
“What’s going on in here?” he said. “I heard screaming and before that what sounded like a shot. I live next door. Where’s Miss Tremayne?”
I started to jerk my thumb toward the bedroom, to say, “In there – dead.” But something stopped me. This thing was getting worse instead of better. Sure, Ronny Chernow had fouled-up on killing me. I was still alive. But there was still that confession he had mailed, there was still a dead woman – the one mentioned in the confession – in that other room, dead by the gun which I held in my hand. Chernow was gone. He was out of it. There was only me. And the neighbor from next door to testify to the police about breaking in and finding me with the murder gun in my hand.
I said. “You back up, feller and get the hell out of here, quick!” I jerked the gun toward him. He turned and squeezed back out past that half broken-in door like a snake slithering out of a trap.
I knew he’d go back to his own flat, call the police. I could hear other doors opening along the hall, voices questioning about the commotion. I jammed the revolver into my pocket, headed for the open window that Chernow had gone through. I went out and down the fire escape the same way as he had. I dropped from the bottom rung into an alley, my feet stinging. I ran out into the side street and kept running until I reached Broadway and a subway kiosk.
The people standing on the subway platform, waiting for a train, quieted me a little, helped me to calm down, to think. They all looked so normal, so bored and average. Just regular people, with regular everyday troubles. No murders for them, no beautiful girls, nobody trying to kill them, no thrills, excitement. Maybe some of them were worried about debts, or somebody sick, or how they would break down Mr So-and-so’s sales resistance. Stuff like that. Once I must have looked that way, too. But not any more.
I caught some of the people staring at me. I stepped over to a gum machine, stared into the mirror. There was a dull red, swollen welt across my forehead just below the hairline, where the gun barrel had struck me. My upper lip still looked puffed. But it was really the expression in my eyes that had made people stare at me. My eyes looked harrassed, desperate, almost wild. They were deeply ringed underneath and bloodshot.
I turned away and tried to figure what I had to do, what would be best. There didn’t seem to be any best. It was all bad. If I went to the police, told them the whole story, they’d hold me. They’d get Ronny Chernow. He’d deny everything. They’d hold me until Monday morning, at least. The news would get out. The story would break in the newspapers. Fran would go crazy with fear and doubt and worry. Monday morning they’d go over the books and the phoney vouchers that Chernow had made out, to get his checks eyery week. Those vouchers he’d have had to keep, to jibe with the regular monthly check of the books by old man Lesvich in the accounting department. They—
Those vouchers! They were my way out! Handwriting experts could prove they were forged, that I hadn’t written them. It struck me like a jolt of white-hot lightning. Those vouchers would clear me of this whole thing.
But then I realized that after failing to kill me, Ronny Chernow would realize that, too. Chernow was as smart, if not smarter, than I. He’d go and get those vouchers – if he didn’t already have them. Chances were, he did not. With me dead, he wouldn’t have needed them. I stuck my hand into my pocket, feeling for the office keys. They weren’t there. They were gone. I realized that Smitty and Vivian must have taken them, after they’d knocked me cold up in the hotel room.
A subway train roared in and I got on. It seemed to crawl down to Fiftieth Street. When it finally got there and I started running down toward Forty-Sixth and working over toward Sixth Avenue, it seemed that I wasn’t really running at all. Again it was like a nightmare – the one where your feet are glued in mud, or for some other reason you’re running like crazy, but not making any progress. But then I was there. I was pounding on the locked glass front door of our building. Inside, I could see the night register stand and the padded chair where Floyd, the night elevator man and watchman, always sat. He wasn’t there. I kept pounding and rattling on the door, going crazy, sweat beginning to roll along my ribs.
This went on for what seemed like ten minutes but was probably only two or three. Then I saw bent old Floyd and his bushy white hair ambling jerkily along the hallway toward the door. When he opened it, I pushed inside. He looked at me, half curiously, half resentfully, for all the racket I’d caused and for disturbing him. His eyes were still full of sleep.
“Has anyone else been here in the last hour or so, Floyd?” I asked. “Mr Chernow. You know, the big red-faced man, with curly hair, always well dressed. Was he here?”