Deadline at Dawn полностью

“Why, your whole mood changed from that point on. It was as though you couldn’t wait to see me to my door and get me off your hands. I cried, Steve. I cried when you left. I’ve been crying from then until now, through half the night, Steve. Steve, are you listening to me? Are you there?”

“Yes.”

“You sound so far-away, so— Is it the telephone or is it you?”

“Poor connection, I guess,” he said, close-mouthed.

“But Steve, you sound so — so cagey, as though you were afraid to talk to me. I know it’s silly, but I have the most curious impression that you’re not alone. There’s the oddest wait before everything you say, almost as though someone were there right beside you giving you stage-directions.”

“No,” he whispered deprecatingly.

“Stephen, can’t you talk louder? You’re whispering, almost as though you were afraid of waking someone. And if you’re awake yourself, who else is there in the house to be afraid of waking?”

The dead, thought Bricky, with an inward grimace.

He clapped his hand to it. “She’s beginning to tumble. What am I going to do?”

She sensed that he was about to hang up in sheer desperation, as the quickest way out. “Don’t. Don’t do that, whatever you do. Then you will give yourself away.”

He went back to it again. “Stephen, I don’t like the way you’re acting. Just what is going on up there? This is Stephen, isn’t it?”

He muffled it again. “She’s catching on. I’m sunk.”

“Wait a minute, don’t lose your head. I’ll get you out of it. Turn it my way a little.”

Suddenly she spoke out, full voice, in a maudlin, drunken singsong aimed straight for the telephone-mouth.

“Sugar, come awn. I’m getting tired waiting. I want another drink. How much longer you gonna stand there talking?”

There was a flash of shock at the other end, that was almost like a molecular explosion; without sound or substance to it, yet he could almost feel the concussion of it whirling through the wire toward him, it was so intense. And then the voice withdrew. Not in physical distance but through strata of pain. Withdrew to a remoteness that could never be bridged again.

When it sounded again, there was no indignation. There was nothing. Not even acute coldness, which is an inverse form of heat after all. There was only classic, neutral politeness.

The voice said just two things more. “Oh, I’m sorry, Stephen.” And breathed once or twice in agony between. “Forgive me, I didn’t know.”

There was a click, and silence.

“That was a lady,” Bricky apotheosized her ruefully when he’d hung up in turn. “A lady through and through.”

He drew the back of his hand across his mouth remorsefully. “Gee, that was cruel. I wish we hadn’t had to do that. She was engaged to him after all — whoever she is.” Then he looked at her curiously. “How were you so certain that would do the trick?”

“I’m a girl myself, after all,” she said wistfully. “We all work on the same strings.”

They thought about her for a moment longer, both turning to look at her, over there in her silver frame. “She won’t sleep tonight,” he murmured. “We’ve given her a busted heart.”

“She had to have one, one way or the other. The funny part of it is, though, she’ll suffer more this way than she would if she’d found out he was dead. Don’t ask me why.”

They left her, then, and returned to their own concerns.

“Well, we know a little more than we did before,” he said. “We’ve filled in another little chunk of missing time. They went to the show at the Winter Garden, Hellzapoppin, first, and then they went to this place where they had the trouble. The Piro — what’d she say it was?”

“The Perroquet.” She had the night-life of this city that she hated at the tips of her fingers at all times. “I know where that is, on Fifty-fourth Street.”

“But that still don’t bring it up to the point where he came back here and it happened. There’s still a chunk out, between the time he left her at her door and—”

She was thinking about it.

“There’s something right there. And something big. The biggest thing we’ve had so far all night. He must have gotten a note, there must have been one.” She went over closer to the picture. “This doesn’t look like the face of a girl who would make up a thing like that, out of her own jealous mind. Take a look at her. She’s too pretty and too sure of herself to think up things to worry about. If she says she saw it, she saw it, you can bet on that. There was a note. The thing is, what became of it? If we only knew what he did with it.”

“Tore it up into a million little pieces, I guess.”

“No, because if he did that while he was still with her, that would have been admitting he had gotten one after all, and he didn’t want her to know it. And then once he’d left her, there was no longer any reason to tear it up, she wasn’t around to claim it any more. He could leave it whole, the way it was. And most likely he did. What I’d like to know is, where did he have it hidden while he was still sitting with her in the club? He had it on him somewhere.”