The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction (27 page)

I knew he’d go back to his own flat, call the police. I could hear other doors opening along the hall, voices questioning about the commotion. I jammed the revolver into my pocket, headed for the open window that Chernow had gone through. I went out and down the fire escape the same way as he had. I dropped from the bottom rung into an alley, my feet stinging. I ran out into the side street and kept running until I reached Broadway and a subway kiosk.

The people standing on the subway platform, waiting for a train, quieted me a little, helped me to calm down, to think. They all looked so normal, so bored and average. Just regular people, with regular everyday troubles. No murders for them, no beautiful girls, nobody trying to kill them, no thrills, excitement. Maybe some of them were worried about debts, or somebody sick, or how they would break down Mr So-and-so’s sales resistance. Stuff like that. Once I must have looked that way, too. But not any more.

I caught some of the people staring at me. I stepped over to a gum machine, stared into the mirror. There was a dull red, swollen welt across my forehead just below the hairline, where the gun barrel had struck me. My upper lip still looked puffed. But it was really the expression in my eyes that had made people stare at me. My eyes looked harrassed, desperate, almost wild. They were deeply ringed underneath and bloodshot.

I turned away and tried to figure what I had to do, what would be best. There didn’t seem to be any best. It was all bad. If I went to the police, told them the whole story, they’d hold me. They’d get Ronny Chernow. He’d deny everything. They’d hold me until Monday morning, at least. The news would get out. The story would break in the newspapers. Fran would go crazy with fear and doubt and worry. Monday morning they’d go over the books and the phoney vouchers that Chernow had made out, to get his checks eyery week. Those vouchers he’d have had to keep, to jibe with the regular monthly check of the books by old man Lesvich in the accounting department. They—

Those vouchers! They were my way out! Handwriting experts could prove they were forged, that I hadn’t written them. It struck me like a jolt of white-hot lightning. Those vouchers would clear me of this whole thing.

But then I realized that after failing to kill me, Ronny Chernow would realize that, too. Chernow was as smart, if not smarter, than I. He’d go and get those vouchers – if he didn’t already have them. Chances were, he did not. With me dead, he wouldn’t have needed them. I stuck my hand into my pocket, feeling for the office keys. They weren’t there. They were gone. I realized that Smitty and Vivian must have taken them, after they’d knocked me cold up in the hotel room.

A subway train roared in and I got on. It seemed to crawl down to Fiftieth Street. When it finally got there and I started running down toward Forty-Sixth and working over toward Sixth Avenue, it seemed that I wasn’t really running at all. Again it was like a nightmare – the one where your feet are glued in mud, or for some other reason you’re running like crazy, but not making any progress. But then I was there. I was pounding on the locked glass front door of our building. Inside, I could see the night register stand and the padded chair where Floyd, the night elevator man and watchman, always sat. He wasn’t there. I kept pounding and rattling on the door, going crazy, sweat beginning to roll along my ribs.

This went on for what seemed like ten minutes but was probably only two or three. Then I saw bent old Floyd and his bushy white hair ambling jerkily along the hallway toward the door. When he opened it, I pushed inside. He looked at me, half curiously, half resentfully, for all the racket I’d caused and for disturbing him. His eyes were still full of sleep.

“Has anyone else been here in the last hour or so, Floyd?” I asked. “Mr Chernow. You know, the big red-faced man, with curly hair, always well dressed. Was he here?”

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.”

He kicked Chernow again and when the other man didn’t move, Smitty walked out of the office into the reception room, slamming the door behind him. I heard the old freight elevator wheezing and clanking as he went down.

I tried to get up, now. I got hold of a corner of the desk and tried to pull myself up. I didn’t make it. I got freezing cold and sweat poured from me. I shook like a bird dog. Knife-shoots of pain stabbed through my shoulder and the feel of the sticky, wet blood there turned my stomach.

I kept trying to pull myself to my feet and not making it. Finally, I got smart. I saw a telephone cord looped down from the desk. I grabbed it, yanked the instrument down clattering to the floor. I dialed the O and when the operator came on, I said: “Police!”

She didn’t seem to hear me. She kept repeating: “Operator! Operator!” I must have said “Police!” a dozen times before I realized that no sound was coming through my lips.

Then I tried to shout at the top of my lungs. The words came out in a hoarse, rasping whisper. But she heard me. She heard me give her the address and the floor number. But I didn’t hear what she said. I was suddenly swimming in a sea of inky blackness.

When the lights came on again, I was in a hospital bed. I started to sit up, but there was a mule-kick of pain through my shoulder that stopped me. I fell back on the pillow. One of the men was tall, spare-built. He had a bald head, except for a thin rim of iron-gray hair just around the ears.

“Take it easy, Morgan,” he said. “Everything’s all right. We caught Smitty Smithers and Vivian Engles at the airport. They were going to Florida. But if Chernow dies they’ll be going to a hotter place. And his chances aren’t good. All we want from you is a few statements, right now, Morgan. Can you talk for a while?”

I grinned up at him. “I could talk forever,” I said. “And probably will. Go ahead. Shoot.”

There were a lot of questions. They’d gotten most of the story from Smitty and Vivian and the dying Chernow. But I was able to fill in a lot for them, to explain how the embezzlement had been handled. When they were through, I found I was so weak I could hardly talk. And I felt sleepy again. They said they’d see me again in the morning. I smiled weakly, mumbled: “Somebody – call – my wife.”

They said that somebody already had and I dozed off. When I awakened again, Fran was there. She was sitting beside the bed, holding my hand. She smiled and said: “How do you feel, Kip?”