Blooey. I didn’t even feel the floor when it bounced me . . .
There was one dim light in the room, and two eyes fastened on me. I didn’t like them. They were too wide open, too glassy. Eyes are supposed to blink once in a while. These didn’t. They regarded me with the cold impassive speculation of a fish three days on ice. Expressionless. Unsympathetic.
The devil with them. I wanted sympathy. My skull throbbed like an ulcer in a movie producer’s stomach. I was an ill man. I was a sick dick and I didn’t like being stared at.
Ronald Barclay hadn’t liked it either, I reflected dourly. And when he didn’t like a thing he was a man who resented it the hard way. For a one-armed guy he certainly packed a wallop. It takes a hefty bash to put me down for the count, but he had what it takes. I decided I was lucky he had only whammed me with a .38. If it had been a .45 it would probably have finished me.
As it was, I had a lump on top of my conk the size of second base and I was lying on the floor, sniffing the dust of the thin carpet and looking into a pair of cold cod-fish glims belonging to somebody sprawled a couple of feet ferninst me. I didn’t mind the character being so close, but that steady mackerel focus gave me the fantods.
I got more than the fantods when it slowly dawned on me that the bozo wasn’t breathing.
He had a vacant, expressionless face as wrinkled as parchment, as colorless as wax candles. There was a wired button in one ear and a switched-off plastic box hanging from his alpaca coat, but he wasn’t using the equipment as a hearing aid. He was the desk clerk, and he was defunct. He couldn’t be anything else, the way his left temple was crushed in.
I whispered something silently.
The fog cleared out of my brain and I tabbed a wheelchair beyond the clerk’s lifeless husk. The last time I’d seen that wheelchair it had contained Ronald Barclay. Now it contained nobody. It was just an empty wheelchair.
I sat up and waited for nausea to hit me the way it does when you’ve got a minor concussion and move too fast. My head vibrated like strings on a hockshop banjo and my stomach churned.
As soon as it stopped churning I lurched to my feet. Astonishingly, I didn’t fall down again. For a guy with a cracked plate, this was a major accomplishment. I felt well enough to hip a quick dram from that fifth of Vat 69 on the table, and then I felt even better. I dug inside my coat, unshipped my roscoe and was back in business. I prowled the apartment.
First I looked in the closet behind the trick mirror. It was a big roomy space, dark as the inside of a rubber boot until I used the beam of my pencil flash. Barclay wasn’t there. When I moved to the bedroom he wasn’t in there, either. I drew another blank in the bathroom – no Barclay. Par for the course. But in a padlocked alcove between bedroom and bath I stumbled onto all the clues a snoop would ever need.
The padlock was duck soup for the pick I carry on my keyring, and the alcove was actually a miniature workshop. It had a wooden bench with precision lathes, motors, tools, strips and bars and hunks of metal that looked like aluminium or duralumin. It had an assortment of chromium steel coil springs, leather straps and the oddest looking hinges and pivots I’d ever gandered.
The corners of the alcove were piled with contraptions too beautifully fashioned to be called junk, but too outlandish to be called anything else. Some of the things had ball-and-socket couplings with mechanical latching devices. Others were whittled of wood and padded with leather to turn a harness-and-saddlemaker green with envy. It was a museum collection, a handicraft exhibit meriting booth space at an exposition. It had probably cost Ronald Barclay ten or twelve solitary and laborious years out of his life, and it was worth maybe seven dollars for scrap.
I heard footfalls.
I whirled, skulked silently back to the living room in time to hear a doorknob click and see it turn. I brought up my cannon and snicked off the safety.
The door swung outward and a tall, wide-shouldered punk ankled into the room – a punk with brown hair in crisp waves and an uncompromising chin as substantial as a granite cornerstone. He had a stethoscope clasped around his neck and dangling down onto his manly chest, but he was no doctor. Doctors don’t wear second-hand bellhop uniforms a size too small for them.
“Hi, Pete,” I said, and drew a bead on him. I was proud of myself for remembering that Pete was what the desk clerk had called him. “Freeze, please.”
He didn’t jump all the way out of his brogans, but he gave it the old college try. He goggled at my gat, backed against a wall and froze as instructed.
“Hey!” he strangled.
I kept him covered. “Just a formality, Pete. I’m a little nervous. For all I knew it might have been Frankenstein’s monster coming in. It might have been Jack the Ripper. It could have been anybody, but it turns out to be a combination bellhop and elevator jockey wearing a stethoscope. The stethoscope confuses me. Let’s hear about it.”
“You – you’re alive!”
“Yeah.” I gestured to the desk clerk crumpled on the floor in a motionless lump. “But he’s not. Explain the stethoscope, please. Talk it up.”
Pete regarded me with bewilderment. “I thought you were dead. When I found you a minute ago, you looked like it.”
“Ah. So you’ve been in here before.”
“Certainly. That’s why I rushed out to get my stethoscope. To try you for heartbeats. You didn’t seem to have a pulse.”
“Don’t tell me you’re a sawbones in your spare time?”
“I’m studying to be one.” He was as dignified as only a young guy who takes himself seriously can be. “I’m in my final semester of pre-med. Winthrop is the name, Peter Warren Winthrop.” His rugged jaw firmed and his kisser showed no good-humored quirk at the corners. “Just because I wear this monkey suit and accepted a dollar tip from you, don’t get wrong ideas.”
“I get many wrong ideas,” I said.
5. Murder on the Make
Putting away my rod, I flashed Pete a fast swivel at my private badge. It didn’t seem to be much of a surprise to him.
“Okay, son,” I said. “You were in here a moment ago. Why?”
“I was looking for old Duffy,” Pete said.
“Him?” I flicked a glance at the deceased bozo.
Pete nodded. “He wasn’t at his desk and the switchboard had a buzz. I thought perhaps he’d slipped upstairs without calling for the elevator, so I ran my car up here to Three, the top, and started scouting the halls. Duffy had a bit of listening at doors occasionally. Wood makes a good sound conductor when you put a hearing aid microphone against the panels. So I noticed this particular door open and looked in.”
“You saw what?”
“You and Duffy were on the floor. He was dead. I wasn’t sure about you, so I went for my stethoscope.”
“That’s all?”
“Yes, sir. Except the wheelchair, of course.”
“Nobody was in it when you first looked?”
“Nobody.” He frowned. “I assume it’s Mr Fullerton’s chair. But if so, where’s Fullerton?”
“That’s what I’m wondering,” I said. “And his name isn’t Fullerton; it’s Barclay. Not that it matters to you. What does matter is, he’s gone. He was here, but he isn’t here now. You didn’t tab anybody going down the stairs?”
“I did not. Although the stairway is nowhere near my elevator, so that doesn’t spell anything.” He frowned again. “But if Fullerton, or Barclay or whatever his name is – if he uses a wheelchair he must be crippled. That’s an assumption on my part, of course, for I never laid eyes on him. But presuming he is a cripple—”