Judge Me Not (21 page)

“We’re looking for a tall dark girl who came in tonight, early.”

“Go ask Duchess Maria, palsy. You got a special choice, go ask the old bag.”

They both giggled. Their mouths looked smashed. Their eyes were as empty as tunnels on an abandoned railroad.

“Where’s the Duchess?” Armando asked.

The blonde pointed at the ceiling. “You new or something? Upstairs, brother. Your friend’s kinda cute. You go look for the Duchess and leave him here. We’ll buy him a drink.”

They listened at the other rooms on the third floor. They were all dark, silent.

Teed whispered, “She could be in any one of these. Drugged or something.”

“I know it. Come on. We need a break.”

Halfway up the stairs they heard a sound like the snap of a distant twig. Armando paused. “That come from up above?”

“It sounded that way. Come on.”

They went up to the top floor. The floor plan was different than on the two floors below. Evidently there had been a halfhearted attempt to make a ballroom out of the open space at the head of the stairs. Overhead was a cartwheel chandelier with three lighted bulbs in it. The corners of the room were in shadow. Two walls, the front and back of the building, were windows. There were two doors in each of the end walls. Light shone under both doors at one end.

Though they tried to walk quietly, their footsteps resounded in the big room. Overhead hand-hewn beams slanted up to the roof peak.

When they were twenty feet from the doors, the one on the left opened and a tall woman stepped out. She stopped abruptly. The chandelier light was full on her face. Her mature body was tightly sheathed in a silver gown that left her shoulders bare. Her hair, shining black, was pulled tightly back, so tightly that it gave her eyes an almost oriental tilt. The bone structure of her face made Teed think of a Dolores del Rio, but the mouth was not right. It was large and ripe and brutal and harsh. She held a handkerchief in her left hand, held her left fist tightly against her side, under her heart. Her right hand was lost in the folds of the silver skirt.

“What … what do you want?”

“You are Maria Gonzales, I believe,” Armando said.

“The light is behind you, I do not …”

“I think you know me. I’m Armando Rogale. And this is Teed Morrow. Where is the Dennison girl?”

After a few moments she laughed. Her voice was a girl’s voice when she laughed.

“You are too late. She has been taken back to her father. She was a silly child to come out here.”

“You won’t mind if we look around, then?”

“You don’t belong here. Go back downstairs.”

Teed watched her closely as they moved nearer. She pulled the corners of her brutal mouth down in an odd grimace and shut her eyes for a moment, then opened them wide. Her voice grew stronger.

“Get out of here! Both of you!”

Armando was the closest. She backed up, swayed a bit, her back striking the door jamb.

“Get out of the way, Maria,” Armando said softly.

Teed looked at her left hand. Since they had begun to talk, a dark stain had begun to spread below her hand.

“Look, she’s hurt,” Teed said.

Armando reached out and grasped her left wrist. As he pulled it free of her body, she spun toward him and struck with the incredible explosive fury of a great cat. She struck with the right hand that she had been holding at her side. Teed saw the glint of metal and he was too late to cry out a warning. Armando took three slow steps backward, his face vacant with surprise. He reached his right hand up and tentatively fingered the dark hilt of the switch knife that protruded from his chest on the left side. The handle pointed down toward the floor. Maria stood silent, her eyes smoking.

Armando reached around the hilt and touched his shoulder, slid his hand back. He said calmly, “The bitch missed. I think it went up under the collar bone. The point is sticking right out through my coat.”

“Don’t try to pull it out. Leave it there.”

They looked at Maria. She still held her side, and her eyes were shut. Her face twisted for a moment and then cleared. She pushed herself away from the doorframe and walked between them, taking careful steps. Her heavy hips swayed under the silver gown. She left the door open behind her. She wavered once and regained her balance.

They could sense the extent of the effort she was making. It was hypnotic, to watch that hard, unemotional determination. She planted her foot on the first step, took another step. She stood motionless for a frozen breath of time, then slowly lowered her head until her chin was on her chest. She bent forward from the waist, as though seeking to examine something hidden on the stair below her. And she followed the direction of the slow bow, pitching down, falling with slack weight on the splinter-rough edges of the uncarpeted stairs, falling with a sound of wooden hammers. Her head and shoulders caught somehow, and they saw her legs go over, the silver skirt falling away, the dim light shining on the puffed white flesh of calf and thigh, and then she was below the floor level, out of sight. The sound went on, endlessly, flesh-thud and bone-hammer. There
was a stillness, a pad of running feet in the third floor hallway, a phlegm-throated gargling scream.

“I’ll get you out of here,” Teed said to Armando.

“Not yet. Can’t move my left arm without crying, but I’m O.K.”

They went quickly through the door Maria had left open. Armando turned and covered the stairs. “Take a look around,” he said.

It was not an apartment. It was merely two very well-furnished rooms. Off-white rugs and eggplant draperies and driftwood finish on the furniture, with here and there a touch of Chinese red to kill the deadness of gray and off-white. A dozen floor lamps and table lamps with opaque shades threw light downward, so that the reflection from the off-white rugs had an indirect lighting effect.

It looked like what it undoubtedly was—the private pleasure palace of a stone-hard ruthless woman—the one place where she could unbend, where she could forget she had the soul of a comptometer and remember that she had the flesh and body of a woman.

“Hurry it up!” Armando called huskily, the ripe edge of his baritone softened by pain.

In each of the two rooms there was a huge pillowed couch-bed. Teed went into the second room and saw, beyond the edge of the couch-bed, the woman’s hand, endlessly opening and shutting, palm down, fingernails making a soft scrabbling in the pile of the pale rug.

He ran to her and stopped when he saw the bloody mask of face. The hair, the long body belonged to Barbara. The face was ruin. She rolled hips and shoulders slowly from side to side and scrabbled at the rug with both hands in the aimless metronome of pain. There was a thin burned taste in the air and he identified it when he saw the small gun a yard away. The gun had been the snapping of the stick. The gun had been the long stairway tumble.

He knelt beside her. “Barbara! Barbara, it’s Teed.”

A long wedge of flesh folded down from the left cheek, exposing the white molars. He saw what had happened. The bleeding was not profuse. The girl had been slashed across the face twice, possibly three times.

The open cheek gave her voice a flat whistling quality. “Missed her, Teed. Shot and missed her and she … had the knife …”

“You didn’t miss her.”

“Teed, my face. I can’t see, Teed.”

“That’s all right,” he said gently. “We’ll get you to a hospital. It’s just the blood that … keeps you from seeing.”

“Teed, I hurt. I hurt so bad.”

“Don’t worry about it, honey.”

“They’re coming!” Armando called.

Barbara seemed to hear him. “Teed, the girl! I found where she is, Teed. The other side of the big room. Locked in over there, Teed. I … I almost got away with it. Maria was too smart. Be careful, Teed. There’s someone with her, I think.”

“I’ll get her and come back for you, darling.”

But once again she was beyond hearing or caring. She rolled slowly from side to side, moving her body but not her head.

There was a shot that made a vast hollow boom and the echoes rolled for seconds from raftered ceiling to high walls of the big room. A man yelled hoarsely and there was the sound of another fall on the stairs.

Armando lay on his belly on the floor inside the first room, the gun aimed around the edge of the doorframe toward the top of the stairs. He was propped up on his left arm so that the knife hilt wouldn’t touch the floor. Pain had grayed his face. But he grinned and his teeth were startling white in the mask of pain.

“Now, as we jolly old British say, we’re for it. Don’t show a whisker in that doorway.”

“You’re even beginning to look like Bogart.”

“I bet he never felt like this. Stage blood he uses.” Armando winced. “And he always looks so happy. I think I just killed somebody. He ran up the stairs and he had a gun in his hand, so I fired. He just flopped right down out of sight. I’m darn close to being sick to my stomach.”

A slug slammed into the doorframe. The hammer-blow impact was a distinct sound above the noise of the shot.

“Barbara is in there. Cut to hell.”

Armando’s eyes narrowed. “Dead?”

“Disfigured. Slashed across the face a few times. She told me Jake is across the way. I’m going over there.”

They listened, heard the murmur of voices on the stairs.

“O.K., Teed. Run like hell. I’ll keep them down.”

He backed up from the doorway, then started running, bursting through the doorway into the ballroom at full speed, running well up on his toes. He counted two quick-spaced shots, then a third that smashed glass, made a tinkling somewhere on his left. Without slackening speed or changing stride, he doubled his fists across his chest, turned and hit the door with his right shoulder, hitting it as close to the frame on the knob side as he could. The door exploded inwards with a rip of torn wood. He tripped and rolled over and over in the darkness, his shoulder numbed. Something metallic and angular fell across him, struck his hand painfully. He thrust it aside and stood up. The room was dark. The light from the ballroom chandelier made a pale path across the bare floor.

“Jake!” he called sharply. In the dimness he could see
camera tripods, dingy velvet backdrops. It was a tripod that had fallen across him when he rolled into it.

“Jake!” he called. There was no answer. He did not know where to find the lights.

He heard a deep male groan, a stirring in the darkness. He whirled, aiming the gun. He peered into the shadows, advanced cautiously, made out the figure of a man, face down near a shapeless cot. Teed crouched by him, flicked on the lighter, rolled the man over. He had a gross face, a beard stubble, a bloody welt over one ear. Beside his head lay a small heavy camera in a leather case. Someone had swung it by the strap.

Two shots awoke the heavy echoes again, resonating through the high-ceilinged ballroom. He straightened up and called her again. One of the windows at the far end of the room was open. The sleazy curtain flickered in the night wind. He ran to the window, leaned out and looked down. There was a paleness down there, a crumpled thing that lay across the hood of one of the ranked cars. A big car. The light from one of the bar windows on the ground floor touched the figure and he saw how dark was her hair, remembered how the hair had felt between his fingers. Time stopped for him as he stared down, knowing from the position of the figures, from the utter stillness, that no one need hurry for Jake again. Ever.

The man groaned again. Teed walked woodenly back to him. He slapped the man into consciousness, put the muzzle of the automatic full against his face. He willed himself to pull the trigger, to let the slug slam the man into a ragdoll limpness. The man inched backward along the floor and whispered, “No, no, no.”

Teed tried to pull the trigger. He could not do it. He despised himself for being unable to do it. He swung the gun, using the arm motion of a softball pitcher. He held the gun flat on his palm and it smashed into the point of the chin of the whimpering man. He felt the bone go under the blow. He snatched the gun up and stood for a moment. He walked to the doorway, kicked the sagging door out of the way.

Armando yelled, “Get down, Teed. Down!”

A head appeared above floor level, ducked down again. A splinter whined off the doorframe, inches from his shoulder. As he started to walk toward the stairs, the gun held rigidly in front of him, his steps slow and steady, Teed
thought of a girl who rolled from side to side with pain, her fingers scrabbling at the white rug.

He thought of another girl who had fallen through the cool night.

From somewhere far away he heard Armando shout another warning, then curse and fire toward the stairs. Now he could see down into the dark stair well. He lifted the gun to eye level and aimed carefully at the heart of the moving shadows. He fired and a man screamed. He took another step and fired again. Something hot pinched at Teed’s thigh, as though a gigantic crab claw had closed on it, the sharpness penetrating front and back. It threw him off stride. After the hard pinch came a warm wetness on his leg.

He fired with each step he took and then there was no movement on the stairs. Just some still shadows.

Someone pulled hard at his arm. He turned and pulled the trigger. The gun clicked. Armando knocked the gun aside.

“What’s the matter with you?” he screamed. “You look like a crazy man. What are you trying to do?”

“I’m going down.”

“With an empty gun?”

“I’m going down.”

Armando’s hard palm bounced off his cheek. “Wake up! What was wrong in there?”

“Jake’s dead,” he said.

Armando whistled softly. He stared hard at Teed. “For a minute we got control. You cleared the stairs. Look. Two of them there. Who do you think you are? Bogart?”

Teed shook his head hard, to swing the mists out of his mind. He tried to smile. “All right, Armando. What do we do now?”

“I think we’re supposed to try to retain the initiative. So we both go down. Follow pretty close.”

Teed followed him. His foot scuffed a gun, knocking it from one step to the next lower one. He picked it up quickly, dropping the other. Armando went down the stairs with extreme caution, flattened against the wall. He stopped one step up from the third-floor level. Teed was behind him. Ahead was the blank wall of the other side of the corridor. To their left was the railing, the next flight going down to the second floor. To reach it without exposing themselves to anyone standing in the hall, they would have
to go over the railing. Teed sensed that the knife wound had weakened Armando to the point where this would be difficult if not impossible. And his own wounded leg was growing less reliable with frightening speed.