Me, I said. I forgot my key.
The voice said, Oh . . . okay, and the door closed. Me, the magic password. Me, the sap, the sucker, the target for a killer. Me, the stupid bastard who was going around in circles while a killer watched and laughed. That was me.
I had to light a match at every door to see where I was. I found Antons on the top floor with another Esq. after it. There was no sound and no light, and when I tried the knob it was locked.
I was too late. I was too late all around. It was five after twelve. Velda would be inside. The door would be closed and the nuptial couch laid. Velda would know all about it the hard way.
I kicked the door so hard the lock snapped and the door flew open. I kicked it shut the same way and stood there hoping the killer would come at me out of the darkness, hoping hed run right into the rod I held in my fist. I prayed that hed come, listened hard hoping to hear him. All I heard was my own breathing.
My hand groped for the wall switch and found it, bathing the place with a brilliant white light. It was some place. Some joint. The furniture was nothing but wooden porch furniture and the lamps were rigged up from discarded old floodlights. The rug on the floor must have been dragged out of an ash can.
But the walls were worth a million dollars. They were hung with canvas painted by the Masters and must have been genuine, otherwise their lavish frames and engraved brass nameplates were going to waste. So Anton had money and he didnt spend it on dames. No, it went into pictures, something with a greater permanent value than money. The inscriptions were all in French and didnt mean a thing to me. Although the rest of the room was littered with empty glasses and cigarette butts, not a speck of dust nested on the frames or the pictures, and the brass plates had been recently polished.
Could this be Antons reward for wartime collaboration? Or was it his own private enterprise?
I picked some of the trash out of the way and prowled around the apartment. There was a small studio filled with the usual claptrap of a man who brings his work home with him, and adjoining, a tiny darkroom. The sinks were filled and a small red light burned over a table. That was all there was to it. I would have left, but the red light winked at me from a reflected image in a shiny bit of metal against the wall and I ran my hand over the area.
It wasnt a wall, it was a door. It was set flush with the wall and had no knob. Only the scratch on the concealed hinge showed me where it was. Someplace a hidden latch opened it and I didnt waste time looking for it. I braced my back against the sink and kicked out as hard as I could.
Part of the wall shook and cracked.
I kicked again and my foot went through the partition. The third time I had made a hole big enough to crawl into. It was an empty clothes closet that faced into another apartment.
Here was where Anton Lipsek lived in style. A wall had separated two worlds. There was junk lying around here, just the evidence of a recent and wild party. One side was a bar, stocked to the hilt with the best that money could buy. The rest of the room was the best that money could buy too. There were couches and tables that didnt come from any department store and they matched the drapes and color scheme perfectly. Someone with an eye for good taste had done a magnificent job of decorating. Someone like an artist-photographer named Anton Lipsek. The only things out of place were the cheap prints that were framed in bamboo. They belonged outside with the junk. Anton was as cracked as the Liberty Bell.
Maybe.
There were other rooms, a whole lot of rooms. Apparently he had rented two apartments back to back and used the darkroom as a secret go-between. There was a hall that led into three beautiful bedrooms, each with its own shower stall and toilet. Each bedroom had ash trays filled with cigarette butts, some plain, some stained with lipstick. In one room there were three well-chewed cigar stubs squashed out in a glass coaster beside the bed.
Something was wrong. There had to be something wrong. I would have seen it if my mind wasnt twisted and dead. The whole thing was as unnatural as it was possible to be. Why the two apartments? Why the one place crawling with dirt and decorated with a fortune in pictures and the other lavish in furnishings and nothing else?
Anton was a bachelor. Until recently he didnt mess with women, so why all the bedrooms? He wasnt so popular that he was overloaded with guests. I sat on the edge of the bed and shoved my hat back on my head. It was a nice bed, soft, firm and quiet. It made me want to lean back and sleep forever to wash the fatigue from my mind. I lay back and stared at the ceiling.
It was a white ceiling with faint lines crisscrossing in the calcimine. My eyes followed the lines to the wall where they disappeared into the molding. Those lines were like the tracks the killer made. They started at no place and went everywhere, disappearing just as effectively. A killer who was strong as he was vicious.
I stared at the molding some more then picked out the pictures that hung over the bed and stared at them. They were funny little pictures painted on glass, seascapes, with the water a shimmering silver. The water had tiny palms. I got up off that bed slowly and looked at the lines crisscrossing it too, reflecting the cracks in the ceiling.
My breath was hot in my throat and my eyes must have been little slits. I could feel my nails bite into my palms. The water was shiny and silver because the water part was a mirror. It made a lovely, decorative picture.
Lovely, but very practical. I tried to wrench the frames loose, but they were screwed into the wall. All I could do was swear and claw at the damn things and it didnt do any good. I ran back through the living room, opened the door of the closet and wiggled through the hole in the wall. The splinters grasped at my coat and held me back until I smacked at them with my hand.
The pictures. Those beautiful canvases by the Old Masters. They were worth a million as they stood and they had another million dollars worth behind them. I grabbed the one with the two nudes playing in the forest and lifted it from the hook. It came away easily and I had what I was looking for.
On the other side a hole had been cut into the wall and I saw the little seascape in its frame on the other side. The shore line and the sky were opaque under the paint, but where the glass had been silvered you could see everything that went on in the room.
What a blackmail setup that was! One-way glass set above a bed! Oh, brother!
It took me about ten seconds to locate the camera Anton used. It was a fancy affair that would take shots without missing a single detail of expression. It had been tucked in a cabinet along with a tripod whose legs were still set at the proper level to focus the camera into the bedroom.
I threw it all on the floor and hauled out everything else that was in that cabinet. I was looking for pictures, direct evidence that would be hanging evidence. Something that would give me the big excuse when I pumped a slug into his guts.
It was simple as hell now, as simple as it could ever get. Anton Lipsek was using some of the girls to bait the big boys into the bedroom. He took pictures that set him up for life. It was the best kind of blackmail I could think of. The public could excuse anything else, but coarse infidelity, no.
Even Chester Wheeler fitted it. He was money, big money. He was in town alone and a little bit drunk. He walked into the trap, but he made one mistake that cost him his life. He recognized the girl. He recognized her as a girl that went to school with his daughter. The girl got scared and told Anton so Anton had to see to it that Wheeler died. But the girl was still scared and eloped, grabbing the first guy who was handy. She did fine until the killer caught up with her again and didnt take any chances with her getting so scared she would talk.