Mourn the Hangman (4 page)

BLAKE CROWDED into the Gulf City bus. He found a seat halfway back and huddled in it against the window. The shaking had subsided now and his teeth no longer chattered, but he was still cold. He wondered if he would ever be warm again.

A stout man punched into the seat beside Blake. He smiled widely, showing yellowed false teeth. “Hello, mister,” he said to Blake. “My name’s Frazer. Salesman with Wall Papers. Wall Papers. Yes sir, lot of people think we sell wallpapers. But Mr. Wall owns the firm. We’re one of the biggest in the bay area. Though — ” his voice dropped confidentially, “don’t know how long we will be, the paper situation the way it is. Why it’s just about impossible to get paper, the world conditions being what they are. But it’s a mighty interesting business. You ever stop to think of all the different kinds of paper there are, mister?”

“No,” Blake said. “No. I never did.”

The stout man laughed. “Well, mighty few people ever do. Very few stop to think what paper means to us. Give ’em a little toilet tissue and the morning news and they’re content-”

Blake closed his ears against the sound of the stout man’s loud voice. He had to think. Think. He wondered how in hell he could think with that man sounding off at his side. He stared out of the window at the lights of the town moving past him.

With the salesman chattering in his ear, Blake thought about Manley Reeder. Manley admitted he had been in Gulf City. He had been hard hit when Blake told him that Stella was dead. But Manley had said he hoped Blake would never find the man who killed Stella. That could be his expressed desire for ceaseless vengeance against Blake. Or it could be that Manley Reeder knew a lot more than he would ever tell willingly. One thing was sure, Reeder hated his guts. Blake shuddered. And there was one more thing. Manley Reeder was ill. A sick man full of hate and bitterness, living alone in that dark house pervaded with the funereal scent of honeysuckle.

I’ll find out about him, Blake vowed, I’ll know everything Manley Reeder did in Gulf City today. Then he shook his head. He was being a private snitch now. Stella had called him that and she had hated it and all it stood for. Just this one last time, Stella, Blake whispered soundlessly.

The stout man was still talking when the bus pulled into the Gulf City terminal. He shook hands with Blake enthusiastically and then clambered forward, brushing people aside as he went along the aisle.

Blake came off the bus behind a pudgy woman carrying a sleeping baby in her arms. The bus driver was talking to a flashy little twist He didn’t even turn to look at the woman and her baby. Blake caught her as she stumbled. She turned and smiled wearily at him. Blake nodded to her and looked up at the terminal clock. It was then twenty-seven minutes past midnight.

As his gaze lowered, he saw that an outgoing bus was loading at the next ramp. He saw the harness cop first. He was standing with his hands on his hips watching each passenger go through the exit to the bus. Blake felt the tremors of premonition flicker across his belly like startled flies. The plainclothes detective sergeant was lounging against the counter in an attitude of disinterest. But Blake saw that he was watching even more alertly than the cop.

It could be anything, Blake told himself. They don’t even know that Stella is dead yet. Still the warning bell went on clanging inside his brain: take it easy, take it easy, take it easy. Suppose they have found Stella. It’s been seven hours since I found her body. If they have found her, they’ll be looking for me.

The stout woman was trying to lift a heavy suitcase from the floor without waking her baby. Blake reached beyond her and picked it up. “Let me carry it out for you,” he said. “You look like you have more than you can handle.”

“Thanks,” the woman sighed. “We were just going to the corner. I’ll have to catch a city bus out home.”

“At this hour, with the baby?” Blake protested. “I’ll stake you to a taxi.”

The woman shook her head. “I couldn’t let you spend the money.”

“Well, you are going to let me,” Blake said emphatically. He had turned his head and was looking down at her as they passed the detective. Blake hoped they looked like a travel-weary couple and child, tired and argumentative. At least the detective didn’t give them a second glance.

The woman was too exhausted to argue any more. Her face shone with relief when Blake helped her into a taxi and paid her fare in advance. “I can’t repay you,” she said.

“You have repaid me,” Blake told her. He stepped back from the cab. She was staring out at him, frowning puzzledly as the car leaped away from the curb.

The outgoing bus was just pulling out of the terminal exit. The cop and detective would be out of the bus station in a moment. Blake wasn’t convinced yet that he was being sought. But there was no use in taking chances. He stepped into another cab and gave his home address. “Just drive by slow,” he told the driver.

The street was silent and deserted when the cab turned into Fifth Avenue. Blake told himself he was just jumpy. “It’s all right,” he said. “You can stop at the curb. I’ll get out.”

He had paid the hack driver and stepped out on the sidewalk before he saw them. At first, it was just shadow against shadow and then shadows moving in the gloom. And he knew he had walked into a trap.

His heart began to thud raggedly. He felt the backs of his legs tremble slightly. The place was alive with cops. They’d found Stella. They’d had time to prepare for his return, if he dared to. There wasn’t a police cruiser in sight along the street and yet the shadows were crawling with cops.

He started up the short walk to the entrance of the red brick apartment building. He moved casually and he didn’t look up to his window on the fifth floor. Somebody tipped off the cops that Stella was dead, he told himself coldly. Who could have called? In his mind, the thought kept recurring: frame-up. It’s some kind of frame-up. He tried to tell himself he thought that because he’d been a private snitch so long that he thought like one, even when his own wife was murdered. But the suspicion persisted. He pushed open the door and stepped into the small corridor. He saw a shadow start down from the first landing.

The door of the automatic elevator was standing open. Blake stepped into it. As he closed the door, the man rounded the stairs and started into the foyer. Blake pushed the basement button and it seemed a creeping eternity before the mechanism began to groan and the elevator creaked downward.

Through the small aperture in the elevator door, Blake inspected the basement garage before he stepped out into it. He saw why there were no cruisers parked in the street. They were all parked down here. He knew that the detective from the foyer was on his way to the basement. He had to leave the elevator. He had to take his chance in the garage.

As he stepped out of the elevator, handsome young Glintner walked around the rear end of a Cadillac. For a full second they stood frozen and stared at each other. Blake moved first. He went forward on the balls of his feet. With his left hand, he caught Glintner’s cheeks. He clamped the palm of his hand hard over Glintner’s mouth just as the youth opened it to yell. Blake’s fingers dug so hard, they pulled Glinter’s eyelids down and stretched his pretty face out of shape.

Glintner jerked his head back. Blake drove his doubled fist
just under Glintner’s belt buckle. Agony leaped into Glintner’s
blue eyes. Blake released him and the attendant stumbled forward retching up
his insides.

Blake didn’t even stop to look at him again. He kept close to the wall, shielded by the line of cars. He moved cautiously out of the garage entrance. He slid around the corner of the wall and stood with his back against it until he could pick out the cops waiting in the shadows. He moved slowly then around the side of the apartment house to the alley.

The alley appeared silent, empty and inviting. For a moment, Blake hesitated. But it was too silent. He didn’t like it. Cops don’t have to be smart, he thought, they just have to be patient. He walked across the alley and went through an oleander hedge into the yard of the big, old guest home. He walked out on the sidewalk as though he had come out the front door and then began to walk steadily toward the corner of Fourth Street.

He heard the roar of a police cruiser as it was raced up the ramp out of the apartment house garage behind him.

He tried to keep walking steadily, but his gait increased and suddenly he was running, his head turned as he watched over his shoulder. He saw the headlights spearing ahead of the cruiser in the darkness. Just as the car swung out into Fourth, its tires squealing, Blake leaped into the darkness of a hedge. The cruiser sped past, was whipped around in a circle at the next block and now inched past along the street, its spotlight bobbing along the dark places of the sidewalk.

Holding his breath, Blake inched back out of reach of the probing light. The backs of his legs brushed a small picket fence. He stepped over it and walked stealthily across the yard. He rounded the corner of the house and started toward the street. He was almost there when a second cruiser came west up the avenue, moving slowly, its spotlight bobbing along ahead of it.

He stood stock still and then he backed slowly around the house. He knew this wasn’t going to last long. They’d have every cop in the area beating through the yards and the alleys. Any moment now, lights would begin to pop on through the windows of the houses along here.

He waited until the cruiser idled past the yard, then he walked out to the sidewalk and turned east. He walked swiftly, doggedly, trying to keep from running. He didn’t want to look over his shoulder. But he knew if he ran, he’d meet a cop before he could see him. The cops weren’t looking for a man of any particular description, although they’d probably been briefed as to Blake’s appearance in a general way. Their orders would be to bring in any man caught on the streets.

He crossed the street and turned a corner. He walked north along Third. His stomach was empty with something more than fear. He knew he was hungry. He hadn’t eaten since noon. It must be after 1 A.M. now, he was sure. He could hear the cars behind him. In his weariness and his hunger, it seemed to him that the sounds were exaggeratedly loud.

He was so tired he felt that it would be nice to lie down on the wet grass and sleep. The shock of finding Stella dead in their apartment had weakened him physically and mentally. Weariness was settling over him and now anxiety was about to finish him. He had to rest soon and he had to eat soon. It was almost a temptation to allow the cops to take him in. In the jail there would be a cot and in the morning, coffee.

He shook his head and kept moving one foot ahead of the other, persistently. He had to find the man who killed Stella. He had to find him before the police did. He had to stay free to find him. If the police got him, he knew it would be a long time before he was free. And if it was some kind of frame-up, he might never be freed. His lagging steps hurried.

It seemed to Blake that he must be very light-headed. His own footsteps were loud in his ears and the sound of them was doubled. Abruptly, he stopped walking. The second sound lasted just a second too long. There was someone following him.

When he looked over his shoulder, there was only silence and darkness in the street behind him.

It’s not a cop, he thought. A cop’s orders would be to shoot, to bring him in. It wasn’t a cop back there. Blake shrugged his coat up on his shoulders and began walking again.

There was an open-all-night café just around the corner on Central. Blake walked past it once. There were no cops inside. Two taxi drivers talked over their coffee. A short-order man and a blowsy waitress talked at the end of the long counter.

Blake started in: The warm odors of food through the front door were tormenting him. But with his hand on the knob, he stopped. He walked back to the corner then and stepping out beyond the building, looked down Third. At the alley, a shadow leaped back into the security of darkness.

Blake let his breath out slowly. He was being followed. It wasn’t a cop.

He returned to the restaurant and went in to one of the booths at the rear of the room. He sat facing the front door, but pulled around so that he was pretty sure he couldn’t be seen from the street.

The blowsy waitress sauntered over. She scrubbed at her pink nostrils with the back of her hand and sniffled.

Blake looked at the menu. He ordered a sirloin steak and French fried potatoes. “I want the steak well done,” he said, “and coffee, black.”

He was pretty certain he saw the thick shadow of a man stroll past the sweated window of the restaurant. The cook was frying the steak at a griddle near him though and the aroma of the sizzling meat struck him. He made up his mind to eat this meal if he hung for it. Only, you don’t hang in Florida, he thought grimly, they lead you into a little room and cook you, the way that steak’s frying on that griddle.

When the waitress brought his meal and slid it into place before him, Blake said, “I’m a stranger here, Miss. Is there a good hotel near? Reasonable, you know.”

She looked at him. “There’s one upstairs over this joint,” she said, “if reasonable’s all you want.”

“That’s what I want,” Blake told her, attacking his steak. It was well-done on the outside, leather brown, in fact. But blood oozed out of the middle of it. Blake had to swallow hard. But he sat there until he had eaten it all. Only the hell of it was, it didn’t help him. The food and the coffee made a scalding knot in the middle of his belly. Food is for the living, too, Blake, he told himself. And you’ll begin to live when you find the man who killed Stella.

He got up, left a tip under the side of his plate, picked up his check and paid the short-order man at the front of the café. He went out the door then and stood for a moment in the light. Wind tumbled newspapers along the vacant street. A truck turned out into the avenue two blocks away. The silence was thick through the heavy sleeping town. The man who was following Blake was nowhere to be seen.

Blake started walking slowly west toward Third. Keenly aware of every movement, he was sure that the man had stepped out of a doorway east of the restaurant. He counted five. Then he turned and looked over his shoulder. A man was entering the café. He was wearing a brown suit and a brown hat pulled low on his head, the brim snapped over his eyes. He was too far away for Blake to recognize him. Still, Blake was sure there was something familiar about him.