“Come on out,” I said earnestly. “I want to see you.”
“Nobody sees me, Nick. How often must I say it?”
“So you’re in a wheelchair,” I said. “Which is why your door opens outward, so you can get away in case of fire. So you’re a no-legged guy with a missing arm and a face that would give dames the screaming meemies. But I’m no dame; I’m a friend of yours. I want to see you. I can take it.”
“No.” His voice sharpened. “And don’t come any closer to this closet. It wouldn’t do you any good. There’s no knob on the outside. And if you smash the glass I’ll kill you. I’ve got one good hand and it’s holding a gun, and I’d kill anybody who looked at me. I’m not fooling, Nick. Don’t force me to do something I wouldn’t want to do!”
3. Dead Man’s Diary
Ronald Barclay sounded sincere and a little hysterical, and maybe a touch demented along with it. Only a loony guy would do what he had done, live the way he had been living. And if he really had a roscoe he was as dangerous as sparks in a gunpowder factory.
I backed off, gave the Vat 69 another fast belt.
“Okay,” I said, “so you don’t want to be looked at. And for fourteen years you’ve pretended to be deceased. That much I’ll buy. As an amateur psychologist I might even understand it. But why did you ask me to come here? And after keeping your secret all these years, why let me in on it now?”
“Because I trust you. And I need a favor.”
“What favor?”
“I want you to be my decoy.”
“I don’t get that,” I said.
He said through the hole in the walclass="underline" “Decoy. Lure. Bait.”
“I still don’t get it.”
“I’m asking you to entice a certain person here to my rooms. I don’t care what pretext you use. That I leave up to your judgment. Just so you fetch him here and leave him.”
“So it’s a him, not a her,” I said. “Maybe if I stick around long enough I’ll learn even more. Don’t let me hurry you, pal. I have the evening free.”
“You have a sarcastic tongue, too. You always had. Don’t rush me, Nick. Let me tell it my way. This man I want brought here to me . . . What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing. Go ahead. I’m listening.”
“Why have you got your head cocked to one side like that?”
“I told you I was listening.” I was, too. Not only to Ronald Barclay’s voice, but to something else that might have been only my imagination. “Go on with your story. You’ve got a reason for wanting a certain character lured here. What’s the reason and who is the guy?”
“He’s the man who murdered me,” Barclay said, and at the same instant I whipped out the .32 automatic I always pack in an armpit rig, hurled my tonnage across the room.
I didn’t plunge toward the mirrored closet. I catapulted at the door to the outer corridor. If there’s anything that broils me to a crisp it’s an eavesdropper. And I’d already had enough weirdness and mystification for one afternoon.
The trick door gave me trouble because I forgot it opened outward. I grasped the knob, twisted it, pulled, and almost dislocated my wrist with the sudden yank. Then I remembered to push.
I pushed. I bounced over the threshold into the musty hallway with its dead, rancid smells, and there was nobody in sight. There was nothing except gloomy, thickening shadows as dusk gathered. I might as well have peered up and down the passages of an abandoned morgue. The silence was a thing you could practically pick up and rub in your fingers.
I went back into the room and pulled the door shut after me. I had the jitters. I had the kind of shakes you get from talking to an invisible dead man who was alive enough and crazy enough to belong in a padded cell.
I needed another snort of the crazy man’s Scotch but I didn’t take it because my brain felt too fuzzy as it was. Next thing I knew I would be having delirium tremens. Maybe I already had delirium tremens.
I should have stayed out there in the hall while I had the chance. I should have copped a fast scram. I should have gone home where I could try to forget I’d ever been in a joint called the Chaple Arms. But no, I had to barge on back into the room.
Barclay’s voice came through the wallpaper-covered speaking hole. It sounded grim.
“You took your life in your hands pulling that caper, Nick. For a minute I thought you were trying to get at me. I almost shot you through this mirror. What was the idea? What spooked you?”
“I realize the risk now,” I said sourly. “But I thought I’d heard somebody outside stealing an earful.” I holstered my heater. “Evidently I was haywire. And for pipe’s sake quit yacking at me about shooting through the mirror. You’re giving me a complex.” I made a resentful mouth at the looking glass. “If you want me to leave, say the word. I’ll go quietly; I’d be glad to. I’m getting so I don’t like it here, if I ever did.”
“I apologize, Nick. I’m sorry. And I don’t want you to leave. Not just yet.”
I did want to leave, but I didn’t say so.
“And another thing,” was what I said. “Just before I dived at the door you spouted a line of dizzy dialogue about the man who murdered you. Let’s stop making with that kind of double talk. Nobody murdered you, because you’re still alive. Taking your word for it, of course. Consequently—”
“Alive! You can’t call anyone in my condition alive.”
“All I know about your condition is what you’ve told me. Have you shown yourself? No.”
“I don’t intend to,” he said harshly. “As for the murder part, call it a maimed man’s sardonic figure of speech. In my own estimation I’m worse than dead, but skip it. There was a man who got killed, though, remember? A prop man. Joseph T. Fullerton, whose name I stole. How do you classify that?”
“An accident.”
“Wrong. It was murder. Premeditated murder, as cold and calculated as slaughtering cattle in a packing house.” He hesitated a second. “Nick, on that picture with the explosion sequence, do you recall the director?”
“Sure,” I said. “Emil Heinrich. A kraut. He’s big stuff now. He climbed slow, but he climbed high. Head man of Paragon Pix. He’s come a long way. What about him?”
“He’d just been married a short while to an extra girl named Marian Lodge. Pretty, but not a brain in her head.”
“He’s still married to her,” I said. “And she’s still pretty. And she still hasn’t got a brain in her head. So what?”
“Heinrich thought I was on the make for her.”
“Were you?”
“My home-wrecking was strictly on the screen. You know that. I never looked at her sidewise, but Heinrich had notions. He actually accused me, once. I laughed at him.” The voice went brittle, metallic. “I laughed at him. Heaven help me.”
“Make your point,” I said.
The short hairs were beginning to prickle at the nape of my neck and I felt that shiver going down my spine, crawling inch by inch like a bad dream.
There was a rustling noise behind the wallpaper. “Yesterday I was getting ready to discard an old trunk, Nick. A trunk that belonged to Joe Fullerton, part of his stuff that was moved here with me when I took his name, assumed his identity. I’d rummaged through it before, thrown away the things of his I didn’t need, then I’d used it to store junk of my own. But yesterday I decided to get rid of it. I emptied it out.”
“And?”
“I discovered a false bottom compartment I’d never noticed before. It had a book in it, a diary. Fullerton’s private diary. I wouldn’t know why a man would want to keep a thing like that. Diaries are for women, I always thought. But Fullerton had one. Made daily entries – up to the day before he was killed.”