Mile High (46 page)

She had transparent acetate tape. She took up two pages of brutality, viciousness and murder, put out the light under the bed and moved toward the doorway that led into the corridor. She unlocked the door. It clicked heavily. She began to tremble, leaning against the wall. She could not make herself open the door. She talked to herself. She told herself that she had to go out into the corridors and do her work. She was so soaked with sweat that her hand slipped as she tried to turn the doorknob. But she opened the door.

The corridor was softly lighted. She was at a far end on the first floor. The other end was approximately eighty yards away. The door into Mr. West's apartment was on the second floor, positioned at the center of the corridor, facing the staircase and the entrance to the elevator. The building was as silent as a mortuary. She stayed close to the wall and glided silently along the heavy carpet to the staircase. She hugged the wall of the staircase as she moved herself, against her will and against her fright, down the stairs—impossibly slowly. She made herself think of what she had to do and how she must study well, in advance, how it must be done, so that she could flee to her hiding place again. This time to Willie's room. She reached the second floor. She was facing the door to Mr. West's apartment. She started to move toward it when she heard a sudden sound just above her and she almost cried out. She felt physical pain from the tension of the muscles of her neck and face. She clung to the wall, waiting for light to fall on her. Moments passed. She remembered the security guard Walt had said he was going to post outside her door. He had kicked his chair or had leaned it against the wall.

She made herself move again. She chose the full newspaper page, mounted on black cardboard. A screaming headline said: SHOWGIRL BRUTALLY MURDERED. POLICE VOW CAPTURE OF KILLER. There was a three-column portrait of Mary Lou Mayberry.

She tore off a strip of tape and fixed the page to Mr. West's door. She anchored it there with two more pieces of tape. She backed away to the elevator door and taped Miss Baby's newspaper page on it. She held her hand tightly across her mouth and lower jaw and gripped hard, so that she could not cry out, and moved like an undersea diver across the corridor again. She came up to Mr. West's door as though she were in a trance. She pressed the door bell heavily. The dog barked frantically inside the apartment. She turned and ran. She went down the staircase and disappeared. She was on the second floor landing and was moving swiftly and silently downward when she heard Mr. West open his door. She reached the first floor before she heard his scream of horror. She ran desperately along the first-floor corridor to Willie's apartment. Fumbling with the skeleton key, she let herself in, then locked the door behind her, gasping for breath. She moved into the living room. Willie was sitting there, smiling up at her.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Mr. West opened his door. The wolfhound padded out into the corridor, searching in both directions. West moved into the hall to look to his right and left, and as he turned to enter his apartment, he saw the yellowing newspaper page hanging on his door. He flicked on the light switch in the entrance hall and looked at the page closely. He screamed. He slammed the door into the wall violently, pushing it away from himself with both arms. The security guard who had been posted outside Mayra's door came bounding down the staircase.

“There is someone in this building,” West said hoarsely. “Find him. Bring him to me.” He took the page down and entered his apartment, slamming the door. The security man ran down the stairs.

West sat on a low hassock in front of a coffee table, the dog sitting alertly beside him. He stared downward at the large portrait of Mary Lou Mayberry as a show girl, beautiful and nearly nude. The doorbell rang. He shouted to come in and turned the page face down on the coffee table. Arno Ehrlich, the security chief, glided into the room, alarmed. Two subordinates remained in the background as Ehrlich held out a mounted newspaper page to Mr. West. “What's that?” West asked shrilly.

“It was taped to the door of the elevator, sir.”

“Why are you here? Get out of here,” he screamed at Ehrlich. “Find the man who was able to break through the most perfect security of all time and who is waiting out there to murder me.” Ehrlich left at once, on the double, the two men right behind him.

He wanted them out of the building. He didn't need them. He knew who had done this reckless and capricious thing. Willie had decided to blackmail him to get the nigger girl. Willie had done this. Only Willie could have saved these crumbling records for all these years, because from the beginning he had meant to use them for blackmail. Blackmailers must be dealt with. Blackmailers must be put down and broken, never to rise again. He left the apartment, the gigantic dog at his side, and moved to the lift. When he entered the lift with the dog he pressed the button for the first floor. He left the lift and crossed the hall to Willie's room, to Willie who had so carefully said he had to go to New York with Smadja and Herr Zendt to recruit the new hotel staff people. West took the master key from his pocket.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Mayra's legs gave way as she stared at Willie. She had no adrenaline left to hold her on her feet, and she slid on her spine down the lintel of the door to Willie's living room and collapsed into a sitting position on the floor. He darted across the room to her. He rubbed her wrists and murmured to her soothingly. He ran across the room to an elaborate bar and poured cognac into a large glass and brought it back to her. He made her drink it.

“You went to New York,” she gasped. “You were sent out of here with everyone else—why are you back?”

“It's all right,” he said. “Everything is going to be all right and nothing nor anyone will harm you. Walt will be back tomorrow. Dan will be with him. I know. That is why I went to New York with them, so I could call Dan to tell him that the time had come to commit his father to institutional restraint—as I had promised him I would when that became necessary. Then I ordered the plane to take me back here, so that I could stand between you and him until this night was over. You have nothing to worry about. I can handle him. I have spent my life handling him.”

They heard the key in the lock. Willie pulled her to her feet and jammed her behind a heavy drapery at the nearest window, then moved out into the center of the large area to face his visitor.

“Willie, we've come to the end of the road,” West said. “You've done what you thought you had to do and I am sick and tired of you.”

“What was it I thought I had to do, Ed?” The two old men were about eleven feet apart. Neither moved closer to the other. The huge dog sat at West's side and watched both of them.

“You're too big, Willie.”

“I'm sorry. I don't understand what you're trying to say.”

“You are trying to blackmail me. You are trying to get that nigger girl for yourself. You are trying to bring me down. After all these years. After I made you a multimillionaire and a friend of some of the most important people in this country. What would your father have said? He would have touched his cap to you. And if he knew you had accepted everything I brought to you and then plotted to bring me down—he would have died of a broken heart.”

“Ed, you've got to take a pill. The veins on each side of your head and across your forehead have become throbbing pieces of rope.”

“Never mind that. You're finished, Willie.”

“Finished, Ed?”

“Your life. It's finished.”

“At least sit down while we chat. Sit down and rest.”

“I'm going to kill you.”

“Why? Please—sit down and tell me why?”

“Don't talk to me as if I were an old woman who had to be humored. Beg. Beg me. Do you want to die? Plead with me to let you live. Tell me what you have done for me. Soften my heart. Confess your lifelong devotion, you two-faced messenger boy.” Mr. West was breathing irregularly and shallowly. He seemed to totter for a moment. Willie backed up toward the side of the room, away from Mayra's feet where they seemed to be hung from the draperies at the windows. West appreciated Willie opening a greater distance between them. He came farther into the room and sat down heavily on the, nearest chair.

“You'll have a stroke if you don't watch out,” Willie said. “Dr. Tumulty warned you. He said that if you agitate yourself, as sure as nightfall you'll have a stroke.”

“A stroke could save your life,” West gasped. “Pray that I have a stroke.”

“If I thought you
should
have a stroke, there are things I could tell you, Ed,” Willie said. “If I thought you had set yourself to beat and break that girl, I'd give you a stroke—for all you've meant to me and mean to me.” The two men were talking in the accents of the New York streets of their boyhood with overtones of Paddy's brogue and Jiggs' Galway speech. Gelbart Academy had not been forever.

“When you're dead I'll go for her,” West said. “She's all of them. She's Mary Lou come back and my mother too. She tore my son away from the church, and she has to be punished. She's a nigger Communist and she lives for her body, so she has to be punished.”

“Then you must have your stroke,” Willie said. “Do you know how I used you all these years and led you around by the nose?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well—the Communist reports from our operatives all over the world. I wrote them all. I copied them out of newspapers. I fed silly Joe McCarthy's vomit back into you with a spoon.”

“You're a liar.”

“I did it to get you up here. Safe up here. To get you out of the world before you began to kill all the women you met and had to be put into a crazy house. Because you're starkers, Ed. You belong behind bars, not for what you've done—you couldn't help that. For what you are—sick and insane.”

West shouted out at him, his face blue, his eyes popping out of his head, but his strength had left him. He clawed at his tie and got it pulled away from his throat, then he ripped open his collar and breathed in heavy, broken gasps.

“Did you ever wonder who sent Irene those letters, Ed?”

“Who? Who did?” West made himself ask thickly but with renewed life, as though the hope of finding the answer to that secret would lead him to the greatest vengeance of his life.

“I sent them. And every time it seemed as though Irene would give in to her compassion and forgive you, I sent another and another. Too bad for Goff. Too bad for Irene. But not too bad for you. I saved you. I had to get you away. I had to tear you out of that insanity that was overwhelming you and separate you from the world, to get you to this mountaintop so that I could save you.”

West pulled himself to his feet. “You killed Irene?” he mumbled hoarsely. “You did that to—
Irene?
” He shambled toward Willie, his face jerking, his face lined with the need to bring death. Willie took a pistol out of his jacket pocket. “Stay right there, Ed,” he warned. “Don't move one step closer to me. I'll kill you if I have to, Ed. I'll kill you. You know it.”

The Irish wolfhound fastened his upper and lower jaws on Willie's hand and crunched them together. The pistol dropped out of Willie's hand as he cried out in pain.

“Bring him,” West said to the dog and turned away, walking to the door. Willie cried out to wait, to wait until they could talk all this over so he could show the reasons why he had to do what he had done. The dog pulled him along. They followed West out into the corridor. West walked unsteadily ahead. Willie's hand bled heavily on the rug along the way. “Ed, for God's sake,” he shouted after West, “please call this dog away from me. He is taking my hand off. The pain is terrible.” West neither answered nor turned. “Where are we going? What are you going to do?” Willie screamed at West as he was dragged forward down the main staircase to the main hall. The dog dragged him to the lake side of the hotel, where a locked glass door led out to the terrace upon the bluff, fifteen hundred feet above the lake. The burning, brilliant lights on their high poles made the whole area pitilessly shadowless. West unlocked the glass door.

“Eddie!” Tobin screamed. “No! Jesus Christ, no, Ed! The dogs!”

West took him by both lapels and threw him backward to sprawl upon his back out on the floodlighted terrace, then shut the door and locked it. Willie scrambled to his feet with frenetic, desperate fright and began to beat on the double glass doors, pleading with West to let him in. His face was distorted with terror and the blood gushing out of his right hand stained the glass as it smudged and streaked downward.

Two dogs came loping in from the left. One came sprinting from the right. They all leaped for his throat, knocking him to the ground. The lone dog got to his throat first and ripped it out. The other two tore at his face and arms.

Mr. West placed the mounted newspaper page showing Baby Tolliver beside the beautiful page showing Mary Lou. He sat down slowly beside the low coffee table, staring with enormous pleasure at Baby's sluttish face. He could remember their contrasts sharply, as though he had just been with each of them.

All of the faces he had ever beaten came funneling into his mind, and he saw for the first time that, in this little way or in that large way, each of them had been somehow like his mother. The faces began to stack themselves neatly on top of each other, the long, full-breasted bodies registering their outlines upon each other. His sight darkened. His left arm hurt terribly. He could hear himself making lowing, guttural sounds deep in his throat, but he saw his mother's face, then her body, come to rest on top of the towering sculptured stack, and his only meaningful past with this horde of dark women fused into one face and one body, and he saw that this new woman whom his son had brought to him was his mother, returned to trick him again. She was hiding from him. She had to be punished before she ran away from him again. He wheeled upon the hassock, then stood up, his strength renewed. He ran out of the apartment with the great dog beside him, straight up the staircase before him. He stood swaying and gasping for air at Mayra's door. He fumbled for the master key. He entered her apartment. The lights from the high poles poured upon everything, but she was not there. He crashed open the door to her bedroom, smashing it into the wall and shouting out obscenities to begin her fright. She was not there. He ran from bathroom to dressing room. There was nothing. He ripped one of her dresses from the closet and held it under the dog's muzzle. The dog darted out of the room ahead of him. He took up an iron poker from the fireplace as he went through to the main door, then followed the dog as he went down the staircase, breath coming to him in shattered sobs. He watched the dog circle around and around outside of the West apartment, then go to the elevator door, as West clung to the balustrade, then the dog began to descend the stairs again, turning right along the corridor on the first floor and padding parallel to the long line of blood that Willie's hand had dropped upon the carpet. West staggered behind him, striking at the doors of the rooms with the iron poker and yelling as he splintered the doors that her punishment was at hand and that she would be flung into the pit.