why nobody was answering it.
I opened my eyes again. Evidently they had closed without my knowing it. The radio announcer was inviting me to subscribe to Back-packer Magazine. I didn’t want to but wasn’t sure I had the strength to refuse. The buzzer was still buzzing. I wished Madeleine Porlock would get up from the Victorian love seat and answer it, or make them stop buzzing, or something.
The radio switched to music. Something with violins. Soothing. I opened my eyes again. The buzzing had stopped and there was the sound of heavy footsteps on the stairs.
I was still in the tub chair. My left hand lay in my lap like a small dead animal. My right arm was draped over the side of the chair, and there was something in my right hand.
I opened my eyes again, gave my head a shake. Something loose rattled around inside it. Someone was knocking on the door. I wished the Porlock woman would answer it, but she was in no better shape than I was.
They banged harder on the door and I opened my eyes again, and this time I managed to straighten up in the chair and kick through to something resembling actual consciousness. I gulped air and blinked rapidly and remembered where I was and what I was doing there.
I moved my left hand, reached around and felt the small of my back. The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow was gone.
Well, that figured.
“Open up in there!”
Knock, knock, knock, and I felt like the drunken porter in Macbeth. I called out for them to wait a minute and reached to check my hip pocket for the Sikh’s five hundred dollars. I couldn’t reach that pocket with my left hand. And why was I using my left, anyway? Oh, sure. Because there was something heavy in my right hand.
“Police! Open up in there!”
More furious pounding on the door. I raised my right hand. There was a gun in it. I stared stupidly at it, then raised it to my face and sniffed its muzzle. I smelled that particular mix of gun oil and gunpowder and burnt odor characteristic of a recently fired weapon.
I looked at the love seat again, hoping to find it empty, wishing what I’d seen earlier had been a mirage. But Madeleine Porlock was still there, and she hadn’t moved, and I could see now that she wasn’t likely to, not without more help than I could give her.
She’d been shot in the middle of the forehead, right where the horrid little girl had a little curl, and I had a fairly good idea what gun had done the deed.
CHAPTER
Eight
I got up quickly—too quickly—the blood rushed to my feet, or wherever it goes under such circumstances, and I very nearly fell back down again. But I stayed on my feet and fought to clear my head a little.
The radio was still playing. I wanted to turn it off but left it alone. The cops had left off knocking on the door and were slamming into it every few seconds. Any moment now the door would give and they’d come stumbling into the room.
I decided I didn’t want to be there when that happened.
I was still holding the damned gun. I dropped it, and then I picked it up and wiped my prints off it, and then I dropped it again and made my way past the radio and through a short hallway with a bathroom and closet on one side and a pullman kitchen on the other. At the end of the hallway a door opened into a fair-sized bedroom furnished with a four-poster spool bed and a Pennsylvania Dutch blanket chest. There was a window on the far wall over the bed, and it opened onto a fire escape, and I damn well opened it.
Fresh air, cold fresh air. I filled both lungs and felt some of the cobwebs leave my brain. I climbed out onto the fire escape and closed the window after me. With it shut I could just barely hear the sounds of police officers caroming off the apartment door.
Now what?
I looked down and a wave of vertigo hit me. I thought of all the drug labels with their warnings about driving or operating machinery. If drowsiness occurs, stay off rickety fire escapes.
I took another look. Below me, the fire escape terminated in a courtyard walled off on all three sides. I might get into the basement, but there was sure to be a cop posted downstairs,