Dead on the Level (20 page)

He got up from the divan and kicked an empty beer can across the room. A stinking beer can. Did his whole life have to smell of beer? The worst of it was that it was the last can. He’d known six cans would never be enough when he bought them down at the corner delicatessen, but for a wait like this one there wouldn’t have been enough beer in the city, besides, he had to take it easy and keep his head. He walked out to the kitchen and looked at the rye bread and liver sausage still on the table where he’d left it after coming from the store, but he wasn’t hungry. Then he looked at the Luger laid alongside the rye bread and wondered what the hell Gorden was trying to pull. The banks had closed two hours ago.

A frightened man can be dangerous, that’s what Mrs. Brunner had told him. Casey picked up the gun, smiling.
That makes two of us
, he thought.

Now that he was in the kitchen he might as well check the back door again. It was still locked, of course, and through the pane of dirty window glass he could see a tiny segment of the alley below, garbage-strewn, naturally, but apparently devoid of human life. Gorden wouldn’t be coming through the alley, anyway. Even to kill a man Gorden would use the front door and wipe his feet on the rubber mat. He’d probably even shake the rain off his umbrella.

And who the hell was Phyllis Brunner, anyway? Just a woman. There was nothing special about that. Casey went back into the living-room and flopped down on the divan again. There was nothing at all special about a woman, unless maybe it was Maggie. Now, there was a thought. Maggie had something, not for the eyes, maybe, but something that would probably wear well or at least be a lot of fun while it was burning out. Maybe Maggie would like to paint her pictures on the Coast for a change. God knows he could find her plenty of nudes with heavy thighs—

And then Casey sat upright and listened to the front door key scratching at the lock.

The door was unlocked now, but it didn’t open. Casey waited, but it didn’t open. He’d left off the lights, purposely, and if the door had opened whoever stood in the hall would be framed in the light beyond—a globe always burned in the hall—but nothing broke the shadows of that wall. Casey stepped over to the door and listened. He could almost hear breathing but it was his own. He could hear a heart beating and that, too, was his own.

The door opened inward. Pulling it open suddenly, Casey managed to stay beyond the tongue of incoming light; but the hall was empty. Unaccountably empty. But someone had turned the key in the lock, and that someone couldn’t be far away. And then he became aware of something that annihilated caution.

“Phyllis!” he cried. “Phyllis, where are you?”

The fragrance of her, the mocking fragrance of that spicy perfume was everywhere. He was in the hall now, searching the shadows, starting for the stairs—and then Lance Gorden stepped up from the stair well and leveled a gun at Casey’s head.

Gorden didn’t hesitate; he fired point-blank. One instant of recognition and his finger tightened on the trigger. Once, twice, three times it tightened and then Gorden looked sick. Nothing had happened, nothing at all. He took a step backward, clinging to the stair rail with one hand, and all the time his face told the story of a man who had finally seen the light when it was much too late to do him any good; because now Casey was remembering his own gun, and his gun wasn’t empty.

Actually, Casey had forgotten that what he held was a gun. The suddenness of the assault left him impressed with only one fact, namely, that he shared this small hall with a man who wanted to kill him and that such a condition needed immediate readjustment. The object in his hand was incidental, and he hurled it at Gorden’s head without thought of the consequences. Gorden fell, how far and how hard was his own worry because Casey was already racing back through the apartment to wrestle with the key in the kitchen door. He was still at it when the hall split wide open with the roar of a gunshot.

Now that he thought about it, in that long, timeless instant between the shot and the silence, Casey understood that peculiar expression on Gorden’s face. Now that he thought about it everything was plain. He waited, listening, and maybe he did hear the sound of running down the front stairs, or maybe he only knew that such a sound was being made. The kitchen door was open now but before the hall filled up with people he had to make sure. He went back, knowing exactly what he would find. Nobody was waiting there with a gun any longer, even the gun was gone. But Lance Gorden’s body sprawled at the foot of the stairway and all about him was the scent of Phyllis Brunner’s perfume.

“For God’s sake,” Maggie said. “For God’s sake, sit down!”

Casey turned around and stared at her. What was Maggie doing here? And then he remembered that Maggie belonged here because this was Maggie’s place and he was pacing the floor. It wasn’t a dream, then. He really had run through those dark, wet alleys, hiding in doorways, hearing the sirens scream, and knowing they screamed for him. And Lance Gorden really was dead at the foot of a narrow stairway.

“It’s got my fingerprints on it,” he said. “My gun is gone and my fingerprints are on it.”

“Maybe Gorden was shot with another gun.”

Casey smiled. Maggie still didn’t catch on. Gorden was shot with the Luger because that was the way it had to be, right from the beginning.

“I’ll get you a drink,” Maggie said, and that made a lot more sense.

He had run straight to Maggie, the way he always did. No time for a hat or raincoat, not with the doors already opening along the hall and the fingers already pointing; but what was a little rain or sleet or snow in this cold world?

“Here, drink this,” Maggie admonished, handing him half a water glass of bourbon. “And get out of that wet coat. Your teeth are chattering.”

Casey didn’t remove his coat but he did get outside the bourbon in a hurry, and it helped a lot. What Maggie didn’t understand was that other things than the weather could make him tremble that way. “You should have seen Gorden’s face when his gun wouldn’t fire,” he said. “Christ, what a situation!”

“It could have jammed.”

“It could have been emptied, too, when he didn’t know it. Don’t you get it, Maggie? She didn’t need Gorden any more. He’d done his dirty work and she was through with him, just the way she was through with me. Now everything comes out nice and even. The old man’s dead, Phyllis has the money, Gorden’s out of the way, and I get a one-way ticket to the chair. It’s beautiful! How big do they come, Maggie? How big do the suckers come?”

“Casey, sit down!”

“You’ll be an old, old lady before you see one as big as me. You’ll never see one like me again, Maggie.”

Casey wanted to bawl. Like a kid, he wanted to duck his head and let all the hurt pour out, but there was no time for that now. The police were already swarming all over the walk-up, picking up the trail, and that left very little time for doing what still had to be done. After it was done nothing would ever matter again.

“Casey!”

Maggie knew what had to be done. The way she clawed at his arm told him that much. “Don’t go back to her! Don’t be a fool!”

Casey smiled. “But I am a fool,” he said, lifting her chin with one hand. “That’s just what I’ve been telling you.”

“But you don’t know that it was Phyllis. You didn’t see her.”

“That’s why I’m going back, to make sure.”

“And then?”

Some questions were too foolish to answer. What did it matter, anyway? It was only a matter of time until Lieutenant Johnson with the blue eyes caught up with Casey Morrow, and nobody on earth would believe the truth of this story. Sooner or later he was going to die. Everybody does. He held Maggie’s chin just a moment longer and let his fingers slide up along the side of her funny, pie-shaped face. “One thing I don’t get,” he murmured. “I don’t figure you, Maggie. How did you get into all this? Why did you stick?” And Maggie Doone, who was wise enough to know when to stop arguing with a man, managed a lop-sided grin.

“I lead a dull life,” she said. “I wanted something exciting to write in my diary.”

Now that it was all over, or practically so, Casey couldn’t remember how it had felt to be afraid. He went back to the place where he had parked the coupé—half a block below the walk-up—and drove past the dirty brick building without a ghost of apprehension. The street, too, was indifferent. The curious crowds had gone back to their warm flats and the last siren had long since gone screaming off into the darkness. So much for Lance Gorden of the beautiful body and the big ideas.

The rest was routine. He drove fast but unaware of speed. The sleet was turning to snow now, a wet, driving snow that melted on the highway and city streets and dusted the fields beyond Harlem Avenue with a sparse coat that would barely last until morning. But Casey wasn’t thinking of morning any more. His mind was on Phyllis Brunner long before the gray coupé found its way to the farm with the white rail fence.

Nobody challenged him; nobody was in the way. That was the way it had to be, because now it seemed that everything had been laid out in advance and what he was doing was only a part of a thing called fate. The house was dark except for one bright set of windows on the upper floor, and that, of course, would be Phyllis’s room.

How quiet he could be when he tried! If he had a spare life to live over a career of housebreaking might pay off. It was easy. Somebody always left a window unlocked or a door unlatched. Everybody made mistakes, even Phyllis Brunner. He crept through the darkness and found the stairway, then paused a moment, listening. No tomb could be so silent.

The nice thing about a rich man’s house was the way nothing creaked or groaned. No boards were out of place on the stairs, no halls left without carpeting, and no hinges cried warning when a door swung stealthily open. In her upstairs bedroom Phyllis sat before a mirrored dressing-table carefully brushing her taffy-colored hair. She wore a mere mist of a negligee, mauve and smoky like her eyes, and the strokes of the silver brush were regular and even until it froze, quite suddenly, in mid-air. Casey stepped out of the mirror and took the brush from her hand.

“Casey—”

It wasn’t a cry; it was a whisper.

Casey looked at her. No devil had ever been so beautiful. “What kind of perfume is it?” he asked. “It must have a name like ‘Kiss of Death.’”

She had to look at him. The reflection in the mirror might be a lie; she had to turn about and make sure. She was frightened now and all of her fear was showing. “What are you doing here?” she managed at last. “What’s happened? Where’s Lance?”

“So far as I know,” Casey answered, “Lance Gorden is still where you left him with a bulletin his head.”

“No!”

“But you don’t have to worry. Nobody will ever know that you did it. My fingerprints are on the gun, aren’t they? I didn’t pull the trigger the way I was supposed to, but I held the gun. And I was luckier than Gorden. Mine was loaded.”

Casey exchanged the brush for the long, spiked stopper of one of the crystal perfume bottles and sniffed the sultry scent with a wry and knowing smile. “Maybe I should be flattered,” he added. “At least you left me living, for a while.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Phyllis protested. “I’ve been here all evening.”

Casey nodded. “Keep talking. You’ve talked me into a lot of things. Why stop now?”

“But I’m telling the truth!”

“The truth! What would you know about truth?”

What does anybody know about truth? Casey waited, wishing she could answer him that. Wishing that somebody, anybody could answer him that. What was this all about, and why? For money? Had Casey Morrow come so far down the road for a paltry few thousand dollars? That, surely, wasn’t the truth. The truth was standing there before him, lips parted and eyes widened with fear.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she cried. “You’re thinking that I’ve lied all along because of last night. Can’t you see, Casey? Can’t you understand? I had to lie last night because you blurted out about the marriage and married to me your life wasn’t worth a nickel. Married to me you were just another obstacle Lance had to remove.”

“And that’s why you ran out on me, I suppose. That’s why you went straight to Gorden.”

“I had to get to him first!”

“Sure you did! You had to get to him and sweeten him up so he wouldn’t break down when the police closed in. So he wouldn’t tell who talked him into killing Brunner in the first place. What did you promise him, baby? Or should I use my imagination?”

“Oh, Casey, that isn’t true—”

But Casey had heard too much. “Stop lying!” he snapped. “I want to know what you did with that gun. I want to know where you left it and, by God, if you lie to me again I’ll kill you!”

The light danced wickedly on the long crystal spear clenched in his white knuckled fist. Of course he was going to kill her. Why else had he come? She was a cheat and a liar; she murdered by proxy and left her stooges to destroy each other. She deserved to die. But now Casey stood at a moment of inertia. Dead center. He stared at her, waiting, and not knowing why he waited, because surely nothing could be plainer than that Phyllis Brunner deserved to die.

And then she answered.

“Gun?” she echoed. “What gun? I didn’t know you had a gun.”

WHEN PHYLLIS SCREAMED the house fell into silence. Casey stood over her looking down at the soft, mauve heap she made on the floor and waiting for the silence to cease. It seemed a very long time before the cautious footfalls came down the hall and the door slowly opened.

Mrs. Brunner came into the room. She saw Casey and the bloodstained crystal spear in his hand, and then she saw Phyllis crumpled face down on the floor. But all Casey could see was the Luger that was pointed at his chest. He wanted to laugh. There wasn’t anything funny about that Luger, it was death with his name on it, but still he wanted to laugh. All of the time it had been that simple. He’d figured the story right except for one thing. It was Mrs. Brunner instead of Phyllis who had used Lance Gorden to eliminate Brunner; and it was Mrs. Brunner instead of Phyllis who had fitted Casey Morrow with a nice, tight frame.