I Married A Dead Man (24 page)

               
"Somebody used that argument before," she told him vaguely. "I can't remember who it was, or where it was."

               
He'd opened the door cautiously and looked out. Narrowed it again, came back to her. "No sign of anyone. I can't understand how that shot wasn't heard. I don't think these adjoining rooms are occupied."

               
She wouldn't budge. "No, this is the time, and this is the place. I've waited too long to tell you. I won't go a step further, I won't cross that door-sill--"

               
He clenched his jaw. "I'll pick you up and carry you out of here bodily, if I have to! Are you going to listen to me? Are you going to come to your senses?"

               
"Bill, I'm not entitled to your protection. I'm not--"

               
His hand suddenly clamped itself to her mouth, sealing it He heaved her clear of the floor, held her cradled in his arms. Her eyes strained upward at him in muted helplessness, above his restraining hand.

               
Then they dropped closed. She didn't struggle against him.

               
He carried her that way out the door, and along the hall, and down those stairs she'd climbed so differently a little while ago. Just within the street-entrance he set her down upon her feet again.

               
"Stand here a minute, while I look out" He could tell by her passiveness now that her recalcitrance had ended.

               
He withdrew his head. "No one out there. You left the car around the corner, didn't you?" She didn't have time to wonder how he knew that. "Walk along close to me, I'm going to take you back to it."

               
She took his arm within a doublecoil of her own two, and clinging to him like that, they came out unobtrusively and hurried along together close in beside the building-front, where the shadow was deepest.

               
It seemed a long distance. No one saw them; better still, no one was there to see them. Once a cat scurried out of a basement-vent up ahead of them. She crushed herself tighter against him for a moment, but no sound escaped her. They went on, after the brief recoil.

               
They rounded the corner, and the car was there, only its own length back away from the corner.

               
They crossed on a swift diagonal to it, and he unlatched the door for her and armed her in. Then suddenly the door was closed again, between them, and he'd stayed on the outside.

               
"Here are the keys. Now take it home and--"

               
"No," she whispered fiercely. "No! Not without you! Where are you going? What are you going to do?"

               
"Don't you understand? I'm trying to keep you out of it I'm going back up there again. I have to. To make sure there's nothing there linking you. You've got to help me. Patrice, what was he doing to you? I don't want to know why, there isn't time for that now, I only want to know what ."

               
"Money," she said laconically.

               
She saw his clenched hand tighten on the rim of the door, until it seemed to be trying to cave it in. "How'd you give it to him, cash or check?"

               
"A check," she said fearfully. "Only once, about a month ago."

               
He was speaking more tautly now. "You destroyed it when it came back, of c--?"

               
"I never got it back. He purposely kept it out. He must still have it someplace."

               
She could tell by the way he stiffened and slowly breathed in, he was more frightened by that than he had been by anything else she had told him so far. "My God," he said batedly. "I've got to get that back, if it takes all night." He lowered his head again, leaned it in toward her. "What else? Any letters?"

               
"None. I never wrote him a line in my life. There's a five-dollar bill lying in there, by him, but I don't want it."

               
"I'd better pick it up anyway. Nothing else? You're sure? Now, think, Patrice. Think hard."

               
"Wait, that night at the dance--he seemed to have my telephone number. Ours. Jotted down in a little black notebook he carries around with him." She hesitated. "And one other thing."

               
"What? Don't be afraid; tell me. What?"

               
"Bill--he made me marry him tonight Out at Hastings."

               
This time he brought his hand up, let it pound back on the door-rim like a mallet "I'm glad he's--" he said balefully. He didn't finish it. "Did you sign your own name?"

               
"The family's. I had to. That was the whole purpose of it The justice is mailing the certificate in to him, here at this address, in a day or two."

               
"There's still time enough to take care of that, then. I can drive out tomorrow and scotch it out there, at that end. Money works wonders."

               
Suddenly he seemed to have made up his mind what he intended doing. "Go home, Patrice," he ordered. "Go back to the house, Patrice."

               
She clung fearfully to his arm. "No-- What are you going to do?"

               
"I'm going back up there. I have to."

               
She tried to hold him back. "No! Bill, no! Someone may come along. They'll find you there. Bill," she pleaded, "for me--don't go back up there again."

               
"Don't you understand, Patrice? Your name has to stay out of it There's a man lying dead upstairs in that room. They mustn't find anything linking you to him. You never knew him, you never saw him. I have to get hold of those things--that check, that notebook. I have to get rid of them. Better still, if I could only move him out of there, leave him somewhere else, at a distance from here, he mightn't be identified so readily. He might never be identified at all. He's not from town here, there isn't anybody likely to inquire in case' of his sudden disappearance. He came and he went again; bird of passage. If he's found in the room there, it'll be at once established who he is, and then that'll bring out of lot of other things."

               
She saw him glance speculatively along the length of the car, as if measuring its possibilities as a casket.

               
"I'll help you, Bill," she said with sudden decision. "I'll help you--do whatever you want to do." And then, as he looked at her dubiously, "Let me, Bill. Let me. It's a small way of--making amends for being the cause of the whole problem."

               
"All right," he said. "I can't do it without the car, anyway. I need that" He crowded in beside her. "Give me the wheel a minute. I'll show you what I want you to do."

               
He drove the car only a yard or two forward, stopped it again. It now stood so that only the hood projected beyond the corner buildingline, the rest of it still remained sheltered behind that. The driver's seat was exactly aligned with the row of store-fronts around the turn.

               
"Look down that way, from where you sit," he instructed her. "Can you see that particular doorway from here?"

               
"No. I can see about where it is, though."

               
"That's what I mean. I'll stand in it, light up a cigarette. When you see that, bring the car on around in front of it Until then, stay back here where you are. If you see anything else, if you see something go wrong, don't stay here. Drive straight out and away, without making the turn. Drive for home."

               
"No," she thought stubbornly, "no, I won't. I won't run off and leave you here." But she didn't tell him so.

               
He'd gotten out again, was standing there facing her, looking cautiously around on all sides of them, without turning his head too much, just holding his body still, glancing over his shoulders, first on this side, then on that.

               
"All right," he said finally. "It's all right now. I guess I can go now."

               
He touched the back of her hand consolingly for a minute.

               
"Don't be frightened, Patrice. Maybe we'll be lucky, at that We're such novices at anything like this."

               
"Maybe we'll be lucky," she echoed, abysmally frightened.

               
She watched him turn and walk away from the car.

               
He walked as he always walked, that was one nice thing about him. He didn't slink or cringe. She wondered why that should have mattered to her, at such a time as this. But it made what he, what they, were about to attempt to do a little less horrible, somehow.

               
He'd turned and he'd gone inside the building where the man was lying dead.

41

               
It seemed like an eternity that he'd been up there. She'd never known time could be so long.

               
That cat came back again, the one that had frightened her before, and she watched its slow, cautious circuitous return to the place from which they had routed it. She could see it while it was still out in the roadway, but then as it closed in toward the building-line, the deeper shading swallowed it

               
You can kill a rat, she found herself addressing it enviously in her mind, and they praise you for it. And your kind of rat only bites, they don't suck blood.

               
Something glinted there, then was gone again.

               
It was surprising how clearly she could see the match-flame. She hadn't expected to be able to. It was small, but extremely vivid for a moment. Like a luminous yellow butterfly held pinned for a second at full wing-spread against a black velvet backdrop, then allowed to escape again.

               
She promptly bore down on the starter, trundled around the corner, and brought the car down to him with facile stealth. No more than a soft whirr and sibilance of its tires.

               
He'd turned and gone in again before she'd reached him. The cigarette that he'd used to attract her lay there already cast down.

               
She didn't know where he wanted to--wanted to put what he was bringing out. Front or back. She reached out and opened the rear door on his side, left it that way, ready and waiting for him.

               
Then she stared straight ahead through the windshield, with a curious sort of rigidity, as though she were unable to move her neck.

               
She heard the building-door open, and still couldn't turn her neck. She strained, tugged at it, but it was locked in some sort of rigor of mortal terror, wouldn't carry her head around that way.

               
She heard a slow, weighted tread on the gritty sidewalk--his-- and accompanying it a softer sound, a sort of scrape, as when two shoes are turned over on their softer topsides, or simply on their sides, and trail along that way, without full weight to press them down.

               
Suddenly his voice breathed urgently (almost in her ear, it seemed), "The front door. The front"

               
She couldn't turn her head. But she could move her arms at least. She extended them without looking, broke the latch open for him. She could hear her own breath singing in her throat, like the sound a teakettle-spout makes when it is simmering toward a catastrophic overflow.

               
Someone settled on the seat beside her. Just the way anyone does, with the same crunchy strain on the leather. He touched her side, he nudged her here and there.

               
The muscular block shattered, and her head swung around.

               
She was looking into his face. Not Bill's, not Bill's. The mocking eyes wide open in the dark. His head had had to swing toward her, just as hers had toward him--it couldn't have remained inert!--to make the grisly face-to-face confrontation complete. Even in death he wouldn't let her alone.

               
A strangled scream wrenched at her windpipe.

               
"Now, none of that," the voice of Bill said, from just on the other side of him. "Get in back. I want the wheel. I want him next to me."

               
The sound of his voice had a steadying effect on her. "I didn't mean it," she murmured blurredly. She got out, got in again, holding onto the car for support in the brief transit between the two places. She didn't know how she did it, but she did.