Floyd looked up at the ceiling. He dug through this thick shock of white hair and scratched at his head. Then he looked at me again. He yawned. “Wouldn’t rightly know, son,” he said. “Not if he had his keys, anyhow. I ain’t let nobody in since seven o’clock, but you. But, then, I was down cellar just now – uh – fixing up things, so I wouldn’t know.”
What he’d been fixing down cellar was his ear. He’d been pounding it. I’d seen the old couch he had down there. But I didn’t say anything. I pushed past him toward the elevator. At night they run the freight elevator, which is self-operating. I stopped before boarding it. I said:
“Floyd, this is important. Get it straight. If Mr Chernow, the man I just described, comes here while I’m upstairs, you phone up there and let me know. Then call the police.”
Floyd said: “Sure thing. I – the police?”
“That’s right,” I said. “You do as I say and don’t ask any questions. This is important.”
I got into the cold elevator, worked the cable until it brought me up to the business offices on the fifth floor. I got off. It was pitch-dark up there. I switched the reception-room light on, walked to the inner office door. It was unlocked. I walked inside and switched on the overhead lights there. I stood for a moment, looking around at the empty desks and covered-up typewriters. It looked strange at night like this, the office unoccupied. There was a musty smell to the place with all the windows closed.
I looked at the desk where Liz Tremayne sat and I got kind of choked up. For a second I seemed to see her sitting there, her hair pulled back in that tight, ugly bun, those double-lensed glasses on her, as she bent over her ledgers. The girl with the dreams – the Jekyll-Hyde girl. Dead now at the city morgue. On a slab, with an assistant coroner probing for the greasy hunk of lead in her back.
Yeah, and with every cop in the city looking for a man answering my description, to pin that killing onto me. I had to get going.
The file cabinets stood in a row against the wall, over by the glass-enclosed office with the lettering on the door that said: RONALD CHERNOW, Business Manager. I went quickly through two or three files, before I came to the right one. It was labeled: Editorial Vouchers. It took me another five minutes or so to wade through batches of vouchers from the Pulp, Confession and Comics Group section, before I found the ones I wanted. Or where they should have been. They were gone.
Panic-stricken, my hands tore through the whole file again. Then once more slowly. All the vouchers for the past year were gone. Gone. The realization that I was too late slid over me like a weighted wet blanket. I half fell against the filing cabinet, my stomach banging the drawer back in.
I recognized the voice right away, even though it was subdued for Ronny Chernow. He said: “I didn’t hit you hard enough, did I? I thought the police would have you by now.”
I spun around. He was over by the receptionist’s switchboard. A bulky briefcase with his initials on it rested on the floor next to the switchboard. Chernow had another gun in his hand. This one was an automatic, bluish-black, snubnose, ugly-looking.
“I heard the elevator coming up,” he said. “I switched off all the lights. I thought it was probably Floyd making a check of the building. I never thought you’d be bright enough – or is it dumb enough – to come here.”
I looked down at his briefcase. “You have the vouchers in there, don’t you? With me in the hands of the police, come Monday morning, and nobody could prove a thing against you, could they? It would be my story against yours. With my signature on a confession, and those airplane tickets in Liz’s purse, making your story look much better.”
“Exactly,” he said. “Now you’re going with me, Morgan. We’ll go down in the elevator, and leave by the back way so Floyd doesn’t see us, through the cellar. Come on, Morgan. Let’s go.”
The only thing I could figure by that was that he still had it in mind to kill me in some way to make it look like a suicide. Perhaps push me in front of a subway train, something like that. Perhaps he no longer even planned to kill me at all, but just wanted to make sure I didn’t interfere with him getting out of the building with those vouchers. Outside, perhaps, he would let me go, knowing that eventually the police would pick me up. I didn’t know. But I couldn’t take any chances on any of that. I was sick of this whole thing. I was up to the ears with it. I wanted it to be over and I wanted out.
He apparently had no idea I was armed. When he bent to pick up the briefcase, he took his eyes off me for a moment. My hand dug into the right jacket pocket, pulled out the revolver. I pointed it right at him and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. It was still jammed. I swore and threw the gun at him.
Then there was the shot. It echoed thunderingly loud in the empty office. I stiffened all over. I waited for the flood of pain that I knew was going to come. Instinctively I balled my fist and jammed it into my stomach. I sucked my lips between my teeth and started to bite on them. But the hurting didn’t come. I’d once heard that when you get shot badly, you don’t feel it the first instant. You’re numbed with shock. I figured that was the truth.
And then I noticed that I was down on my knees. What felt like a cherry-hot poker went through my shoulder. I clamped a hand up there, just over the right breast and felt the hole in my suit as I went over onto my face. But I didn’t black out. I lay very still, waiting for the second shot that would finish me. It came – louder, more choking, more deafening than the first. I didn’t feel that one, either. Then I heard a voice and I knew why I wouldn’t ever feel that second bullet. I hadn’t gotten it.
I was sprawled on my side, to one side of a desk. I could look under the desk and I saw that Ronny Chernow was on the floor, too. He was on his belly, and inching himself along, clawing his way with both hands, dragging himself toward a pair of black patent-leather shoes with tiny, shiny black bows on the toes. I heard the man called Smitty say:
“You can’t renege on me, Chernow, you big overdressed punk!” Smitty piled a gutter name on top of that. “When I called you and told you what happened, you said that was tough. Me and Vivian wouldn’t get our fee for botching the job. I started to tell you we’d better, that we did half the job anyhow, got that guy to sign the confession for you and put it in the mail. But you didn’t give me a chance. You hung up on me, after telling me where I could go for my grand. You didn’t think there was anything we could do about it, did you? You don’t know me very well. Chernow. I don’t like welchers.”
Chernow, crawling along the office floor, almost got to Smitty’s patent-leather shiny shoes. He reached for them. Smitty stepped inside the reach and kicked Chernow in the face.
“You were just driving off in that big Caddy of yours when I got to your apartment, Chernow,” Smitty said. “I followed you. I followed you every place. Even here. I got in with the keys I took from that other guy, that Morgan guy’s pocket. I’ve been waiting for a nice quiet place to do this to you. No witnesses or nothing. I was just going to do it when you heard the elevator and put the lights out. So I waited.”
Under the desk, I watched Smitty bend over Chernow and when Chernow reached for his throat, Smitty slammed him across the temple with his gun butt. It made a sickening sound. I gagged and covered my mouth with my hand, praying Smitty wouldn’t hear me. I didn’t move. I watched Smitty take Chernow’s wallet from inside his jacket pocket. He pulled out a thick sheaf of bills, thumbed through them.
“Nice,” he said. “What a break. Nearly five thousand, all in hundreds and fifties. This is a much better fee than you promised, Mister Chernow. It looks like Vivian and me are going to take a nice little trip. Florida, maybe. We’ve always wanted to go to Florida, even in the spring.”