The Drill Is Death

by FRANCES

  “She tries to get away,” Hunter said, and seemed to speak chiefly to himself, but also somewhat to the big man. “Knocks the table over and the drawer comes open and the gun falls out. Drawer doesn’t stick, does it?”

  “Didn’t seem—” Gilky said, but moved over to the table, and pulled the little drawer out and pushed it in again. “Nice and easy,” he said.

  “Only,” Hunter said, “he’s knifed her by then.”

  He moved a little closer to the table.

  “About here, that would be. She falls, but she’s not dead yet. He thinks she’s done but she gets hold of the gun and—” He shrugged. The revolver shrugged in his hand. “Looks all right,” he said. “See anything wrong with it, Gilk?”

  The girl was afraid, now. She shrank back into the chair, and her slender hands drew back, clenched into fists.

  “It’ll make a noise,” Reg heard himself say, absurdly as if he, too, were helping with the details of the plan—the plan for her murder, for his own murder.

  “Backfire,” Hunter said, as if Reg’s contribution were quite to be expected, needed an answer. “Anyway, people in this town don’t horn in on things.”

  Get him talking. No man’s concentration holds forever. You can tell by the eyes. Concentration goes out of the eyes first, inattention shows there first.

  “She asked the question,” Reg said. “Why, Hunter?”

  “Man wants it that way,” Hunter said. “Nothing to me one way or the other. Nothing to Gilky.”

  “Or,” Reg said, “Bennie. Or Larsen. Or the one you call the Slasher? Must have been good once, the Slasher.”

  Hunter looked at him, now. Was it distraction in his eyes? Even, bafflement that a man should thus participate in the planing of his own murder, thus ask questions to which any answer would be meaningless? Was this the moment to—

  “Good enough,” Hunter said, and at the same instant a buzzer sounded loudly from the hall.

  “Got visitors,” Grant said, and spoke loudly. Hunter said, “Shut up,” and the gun tightened in his hand. Blast the buzzer; blast and damn the buzzer.

  “Press the button and the door downstairs—” Reg said, and again, low and hard, Hunter told him to shut up, and again the gun emphasized. Reg shut up. Without taking his eyes off Reg, Hunter gestured with his head to Gilky. Gilky nodded, looked at the girl briefly, and went along the corridor toward the front room. The buzzer sounded again, for a longer time than before. Gilky went past the wall box and did not touch it. The buzzer sounded once more, and now Hunter moved so that he could cover both Peggy Larkin and Reg.

  It didn’t matter, really, Reg thought. They could shout their heads off and not be heard by anyone—a policeman, probably—standing in the entry hall and pressing a button there. He waited for the buzzer to sound again. After some seconds, he knew it wasn’t going to sound again.

  After a few more seconds, they heard the big man coming back through the hall. He moved, for so big a man, with little sound. He came into the bedroom and this time he closed the door behind him.

  “Prowl car,” he said. “Couple of cops looking up at the windows.”

  “See you?”

  “Don’t,” Gilky said, “be a damn fool. Just stopped by to have a look-see. Do it every hour on the hour, maybe. See if Mr. Grant’s come home.”

  Hunter seemed to consider that. He looked at Grant. Reg looked at him steadily. Make him believe this, for God’s sake. Make him—

  “No,” he said. “I didn’t call them. I didn’t have a chance, Hunter. Probably what your bully-boy here says. Only—little coppers have big ears, I expect.”

  Hunter looked at Gilky.

  “Drove off,” Gilky said. “All the same, we’d better get on with it. Start with the girl or—”

  “You’re damn right,” Hunter said. “No noise about that.”

  He put his free hand in his pocket and brought it out with a flat, long object. He pressed something, and a knife blade jumped from the object. Hunter looked at it.

  Time was running out. There wasn’t going to be a better time.

  Reg looked beyond Hunter, beyond Gilky—who, like the other man, was looking at the long blade of the knife.

  The girl did not seem to have moved in her chair. But her right hand was touching—almost touching—a heavy glass ash tray on a table by the chair. Reg made his eyes blank.

  “Better we use one of his,” Hunter said. “See what’s in the kitchen, Gilky. Blade about this size, so it’ll match the other. See what I mean?”

  Gilky said, “Sure,” and went past Reg and back into the hallway. He left the door open, this time. Reg heard him open the kitchen door.

  This was—

  She threw the ash tray. She came out of the chair on springs, and threw hard, and her aim wasn’t good enough. But Hunter had to dodge to keep it from being good enough, and the gun dodged with him—dodged away from Reg Grant.

  But Reg wasn’t where he had been, by then. He was half across the room, and there wasn’t any skill this time—no time for skill.

  This was all he had in one right, and no time for another if the first one missed.

  It didn’t miss. It wasn’t solid, but it didn’t miss.

  Hunter staggered and lost his balance and went down on his knees. But he still had the gun in his right hand.

  Reg kicked the right hand and the gun bounced away. He started toward it and the girl said, loudly, “Look out! He’s—”

  Reg whirled. The big man came toward him in a rush. He was like a bull charging. No chance of stopping that, body against body. No—

  Reg dodged. He stuck out a foot, kicked with a foot.

  Gilky fell, but not hard enough. He fell only a few feet from the gun on the floor. But now Hunter; too, was scrambling for the gun.

  They wouldn’t have time. They had to do what they could.

  Reg grabbed the girl, and turned her toward a window. For an instant she seemed to stiffen in his grasp. Then she ran with him the few feet to the window.

  An open window, thank God. A window almost never closed to keep heat into this stuffy American room. A window unscreened—a window to the roof of an extension of the floor below—a window—

  He pushed the girl through the window, and she fell on the roof outside. He threw himself after her.

  They made a noise about it. No help for the noise. Rain fell through even denser fog. Thank the gods for the fog and rain.

  He guided her along the roof, keeping close to the wall. To see them from the window they had come through, the men (who’d have the gun by now, would have untangled themselves by now) would have to lean out of it. Maybe they wouldn’t want to lean—

  At the far end of the roof an iron fire ladder led down to the garden below.

  They hugged the wall, Reg screening the girl’s slim body. He looked back. One of them—there was too little light to see which—was leaning out the window. Now he was starting to climb out the window.

  A running target is a difficult target, particularly if the target wavers in fog and rain.

  He guided, kept her ahead—kept himself between her and the man coming out the window. When they had crossed the roof, he put the arch of the ladder’s rail under her hand.

  She was quick—a quick girl, this red-haired filly of his, this red kitten at bay. She went down the ladder fast.

  Reg himself took only the first of the rungs, then dropped. Again they hugged the wall of the house, crouched in shadow. They could hear the men—both of them, now—on the roof above.

  XV

  What Nathan Shapiro was groping for in his mind was not brought within reach by his absently gazing through a not clean window into fog and rain. His mind was, Shapiro thought, as foggy as the night. He might as well do as John suggested—call it a day, grope his way home. Probably he could find Brooklyn. It was clear he couldn’t find anything else.

  He heard the sound of Stein’s voice at the desk behind him; did not listen to Stein’s words. It was a hel
l of a note to have only fog for mind, to lose things in a foggy mind. Not, probably, would what he sought amount to anything if he did find it. This was negative consolation, if any consolation. Usually what I puzzle over is useless when I puzzle it out, Nathan Shapiro thought. I should have been a bookkeeper. Except, he added dismally, that I can’t add. He heard Lieutenant John Stein put the receiver back and turned.

  “No soap,” Stein said, and Shapiro raised dark eyebrows. “I wasn’t listening,” Shapiro said. “Something to do with Grant?”

  A squeal, Stein told him. Just a screwball’s squeal, passed on as a matter of routine, since, for some hours, anything having to do with Reginald Grant had been passed on to Homicide, Manhattan West Passed on for the record, so that nobody could say it hadn’t been.

  Somebody had called downtown and identified himself as Reginald Grant, and said he was at his flat and asked that somebody be “sent,” presumably to pick him up.

  This had not, of course, greatly excited anyone. If Grant wanted to turn himself in, he needed only hail the nearest taxicab and ask to be driven to the nearest police station. There would be no point in his returning to his apartment and asking to be sent for.

  “Save him taxi fare,” Shapiro said and Stein smiled at that—not broadly, for no more than it was worth. He did admit that there was that.

  Actually, it was obvious enough. Somebody was merely having fun and games—one of those many who like to annoy the police, for no special reason except, presumably, a dislike of policemen. All police forces encounter such—the cranks, the screwballs. And, however obvious an instance is, the police must permit themselves to be annoyed.

  Hence—the incident of the man who said he was Reginald Grant was passed through channels. Hence, a cruise car had poked through East Twenty-first Street and double-parked in front of the building Grant had an apartment in.

  The two policemen who had got out of the car had looked up at dark windows on the second floor, and been in no way surprised. One of them had gone into the entrance hall and used a flashlight to find the proper button and pressed on it, not once but several times. This had led to nothing, and again neither of the policemen had been surprised.

  They had reported in, asked for instructions. Presumably, if they looked hard enough and long enough, they could find the superintendent, which was to say the janitor. He did not live in the building. It was likely that he had several buildings in charge, and might live in any of them or, for that matter, in some other building entirely. Found, he could—probably—provide a key to Grant’s apartment. It would then be possible to prove that Grant wasn’t there, not there and playing coy. Except, if he had called and asked to be apprehended, would he now—?

  “Skip it,” the dispatcher, after consulting authority, told them. “Another crackpot. Drop around again in an hour or so and give it another try. That’ll be—hold it. Woman in East Eighteenth says she saw a man going up a fire escape in the house back of hers. Probably forgot his key. Check out and report.”

  “Crackpot,” Stein said, having summarized this. “Knock it off for the day, Nate. Go home and walk the pooch.”

  “Rose’ll have walked him,” Nate said. “But I guess you’re right and—”

  He stopped and looked at Stein in a manner which made Stein feel, momentarily, that there must be something wrong with his appearance. He smoothed his dark hair, involuntarily. He needed a haircut, but it wasn’t that bad.

  “Be seeing,” Nathan Shapiro said, and went out of Stein’s office, wondering to what purpose he had suddenly noticed the whiteness of Stein’s teeth. He had noticed this when, told that perhaps Grant had wanted to save cab fare, Stein had given the remark such a marginal smile as it was worth. Fine white teeth; regular white teeth. Lucky so and so, Shapiro thought. I’d better get around to the dentist. That was all it was in my mind. Nothing to do with this. Only that Rose has been after me to get to the dentist for a cleaning.

  The mind is a funny thing, Nathan Shapiro thought, going to his locker. Mine is a particularly funny mind, going roundabout to no purpose. A man is found dead in England with his teeth missing, and I notice Johnny’s teeth, and what it comes to is that I ought to make a dentist’s appointment. That’s all it comes—

  Shapiro’s mind stopped as he stood in front of his locker, reaching into it for his raincoat—a rather long, black raincoat.

  Was that all of it? Wasn’t there somewhere, back somewhere in the foggy muddle of his mind, something else about teeth? Fine, regular, white teeth—teeth so brightly white, so rigidly regular, that one’s first thought was sceptical and one’s second that no dentist worth his D.D.S. nowadays made teeth so improbable.

  Shapiro’s own first thought was to put through a call to London. He weighed this briefly. It would be the middle of the night in London. A bad time to ask an obviously ludicrous question which almost certainly could not be answered without much tedious research, if it could be answered at all.

  Probably be a waste of time and telephone tolls in any case. Nothing, really, but a foggy uneasiness in a foggy mind. Even if I get the answer, where will I be, Shapiro asked himself, and was not surprised to be greeted by a damp silence. Still—

  Shapiro put on his dark raincoat, and his still-wet hat, and went out into West Twentieth Street. He might as well, he decided, walk across town and take his Brooklyn train at Twenty-third and Fourth. He had to walk in the rain at one end of the ride or the other. Might as well do it now.

  Nathan Shapiro walked east through fog and rain, his hat getting wetter, water running off his dark raincoat. He didn’t really have anything, and knew it. And if he did have, walking a few blocks out of his way to look up at two dark windows wasn’t going to be of any help. The windows had already been looked up at, in any case. And a button had already been pushed on. Still—

  His .38 in its shoulder holster was hard against his ribs. Be a comfort to get home and be able to take it off. Must get some time in on the range before long. Not that he wasn’t already good with it. Nathan Shapiro had to admit that to himself. With a gun, he was all right. Too bad his only skill lay in his right hand. If he had a mind, now—

  From time to time since he had lived in the flat, Reginald Grant had looked down on the garden which lay under his rear windows. It was a paved area for the most part; it was bordered by turned earth where, when he had first moved in, some flowers—he took them to be zinnias—bloomed with no special enthusiasm. They were gone, now—had been gone for several weeks. In early October, when some days were still hot, the people who rented the ground floor, and apparently the garden with it, had sat for evening cocktails at a table in the garden. They had not looked particularly comfortable. Their presence there, Reg had assumed, was largely ritual—get out into the air for coolness. But the high board fence which surrounded the little open space must, surely, prevent air from stirring in it.

  Reg had never, in those days, been in the garden where he and Peggy Larkin now crouched against the house wall, making themselves as small as possible, listening to the movement of feet on the roof above them. The garden was accessible, he supposed, only through the quarters of the people who rented the ground floor. (Except, obviously, in case of fire or other emergency.) He did not, of course, know the ground-floor people.

  While he and the girl hugged—it occurred to Reg that the proper term was “cowered against”—the house they were momentarily invisible to the men above and, hence, in no immediate danger of being shot at. To get a gun pointed at them, one of the men would have to lie flat on the roof, stick his head over, and fire directly down. The roof had some overhang, which would complicate that manoeuvre.

  The chance of shooting him, in the back, as he went across the roof to the ladder, shielding the girl, had been better. Perhaps they had not been ready. Perhaps using noisy firearms out of doors, with police in the vicinity, had seemed too risky. Taking this brief breather, still shielding the girl’s body with his own, Reg wondered whether it was not more tha
n that. One of the strangest things about all this, all of which was surely aimed at him, was still that, if they wanted him dead—dead by their hands, not the law’s—they had had abundant opportunity to make him dead. Opportunity not taken.

  No use speculating further about that. Not now. Speculate now on what was to be done next. Remember the garden as he had looked at it casually. A way out?

  The surrounding fence had looked solid and had looked high. And, once over it, whichever fence one climbed, one was in another area identically walled around. A series of little cells, extending the length of the block. The ones on either side with trees in them. Plaintive trees.

  The girl’s body was tense against his own. He pressed one of her shoulders and she put her head back and looked up at him. Her face was wet with the rain; her eyes were very large. She had been trembling just perceptibly; his hand’s pressure seemed to lessen that.

  If the people who lived on the ground floor were home, they might let them through. (Say to them, if they came to the door, “Sorry to be such a bother, and all that. But a couple of men are trying to kill us?”)

  They were still near the ladder. The door which gave access to the garden, and might provide escape from it, was some feet to their left. Try that first.

  He did not speak. A man might be on his belly above, peering down into fog and rain, trying to get a line on where, precisely, they had got to. He used, gently, the pressure of his body and of his hands to tell her. They crept, together, along the wall of the house toward where he thought the door would be.

  He was conscious, at first vaguely, that there was something wrong with this—that this wasn’t going to work out. It was some seconds before he understood the reason for this doubt. He didn’t think the people of the ground floor were at home. Little sounds of occupancy had sometimes drifted up to him, through open windows, even through the ceiling of their flat and the floor of his. He realized now that he had not, for several days before all this started, heard any of the little sounds.

  They went past a window, where shadows grayly reflected in the glass. No light behind the glass.