I was right. The stairs were empty as I came around the first flight and started down the second.
Now I stopped my running and went more cautiously, staring at the treads, as if by doing this I might catch some clue as to exactly what had happened.
And as I came down the stairs, I smelled the lotion smell again—the same scent I had caught on Bennett and in the office, where I’d found Bennett’s doll.
There was a smear of liquid, thinly spread, on the first steps and on the landing floor—as if someone had spilled some water. I stooped and ran my fingers through the wetness and it was simply wetness. I lifted my fingers and smelled of them, and the lotion smell was there, but stronger than it had been before.
I could see that two trails of wetness ran across the landing and went down the following flight, as if someone had carried a glass of water and the water had been dripping. This, then, I told myself, was the track of the one who should have died; this wetness was the trail that he had left behind him.
There was horror in that stairwell, a place so quiet and empty that it would have seemed that any emotion, even horror, would have been impossible. But the emptiness itself, perhaps, was a portion of the horror, the emptiness where there should have been a body, and the trail of smelly liquid to show the way that it had gone.
I went charging down the stairs, with the horror howling in my brain, and as I ran I wondered what I’d do or what would happen should I meet that shape, waiting on the stairs; but, even thinking of it, I could not halt my fleeing and went hammering down the stairs until I reached the ground floor.
There was no one on the floor except the shoe-shine boy, dozing in a chair tipped back against the wall, and the cigar-counter man, who leaned against the counter, reading a paper he had spread flat before him.
The cigar man looked up and the shoe-shine boy crashed forward in his chair, but before either of them could move or shout, I was through the revolving door and outside on the street. The street was becoming crowded with shoppers, who flocked downtown two nights each week for the evening store hours.
Once in the street, I ran no longer, for here I felt that I might be safe. At the corner, I stopped and looked back at the McCandless Building, and it was just a building, an old and time-stained building that had stood too long and would be torn down before too many years had passed. There was nothing mysterious about it, nothing sinister.
But as I looked at it I shivered, as if a cold wind had come out of somewhere to blow across my soul.
I knew just what I needed and I went down the street to find it. The place was just beginning to fill up, and somewhere in the dimness toward the back someone was playing a piano. Well, not really playing it, just fooling around, every once in a while fingering a snatch of melody.
I went toward the back, where there wasn’t so much traffic, and found myself a stool.
“What’ll it be?” asked the man behind the bar.
“Scotch on ice,” I said. “And while you’re about it, you might make it double. It’ll save wear and tear on you.”
“What brand?” he asked.
I told him.
He got a glass and ice. He picked a bottle off the back bar.
Someone sat down on the stool that was next to mine.
“Good evening, miss,” the bartender said. “What can we do for you?”
“A Manhattan, please.”
I turned around at the sound of the voice, for there was something in it that jerked me to attention.
And something about the girl as well.
She was a stunning person, with a beauty that did not erase her personality.
She stared back at me. She was as cool as ice.
“Have we met somewhere?” she asked.
“I believe we have,” I told her.
She was the blonde I had picked out of the shoe box—now incredibly grown up and clothed.
XII
The bartender set my drink before me and began fixing her Manhattan.
He had a bored look on his face. He’d heard a lot of pickups made, most likely, at this very bar. “Not too long ago,” she said.
“No.” I told her. “Just a little time. At an office, I believe.” If she knew what I was talking about, she surely didn’t show it. And yet she was too cold, too icy, too sure of herself.
She opened a cigarette case and took out a smoke. She tapped it and stuck it in her mouth and waited.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I don’t smoke. I don’t carry fire.”
She reached into her bag and took out a lighter. She handed it to me. I snapped it and the flame licked out. She leaned to get the light, and as she did I smelled the scent of violets—or, at least, of some floral perfume. I imagined it was violet.
And suddenly I became aware of something I should have thought of at the very first. Bennett had not smelled the way he did because he had used shaving lotion but because he had failed to use it. The scent of him had been the smell of the sort of thing he was.
The girl got her light and leaned back, dragging in the first lungful of the smoke. She let it trickle from her nostrils very daintily.
I handed her the lighter. She dropped it in her bag. “Thank you, sir,” she said.
The bartender put her Manhattan on the bar. It was a pretty thing, with the stemmed red cherry exactly positioned. I gave him a bill. “The both of them,” I said. “But, sir,” she protested.
“Don’t thwart me,” I pleaded. “It’s a passion with me— providing pretty girls with booze.”
She let it pass. She eyed me, still a little coldly.
“You’ve never smoked?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“To keep your sense of smell?” she asked.
“My what?”
“Your sense of smell. I thought you might be in some sort of work where a sense of smell might be an asset.”
“I had never thought of it that way,” I said, “but perhaps I am.”
She picked up her drink and looked at me closely above the top of it.
“Sir,” she said calmly, evenly, “would you like to sell yourself?”
I’m afraid that that one got me. I didn’t even stammer. I just stared at her. For she wasn’t kidding; she was businesslike.
“We could start at a million ” she said, “and bargain up from there.”
I got my mental feet back under me again. “My soul?” I asked. “Or is the body all? With the soul, it would come just a little higher.”
“You could keep your soul,” she told me.
“And the offer comes from you?”
She shook her head. “Not me. I have no use of you.”
“You represent someone? Someone, perhaps, who’d buy anything at all. A store and close it down. Or an entire city.”
“You catch on fast,” she said.
“Money’s not everything,” I told her. “There are other things.”
“If you prefer,” she said, “we could consider other things.”
She put down her drink and reached into her bag. She handed me a card.
“If you should reconsider, you can hunt me up,” she said. “The offer’s still wide open.”
She was off the stool and moving out into the gathering crowd before I could answer or do a thing to stop her.
The bartender drifted past and looked at the untouched drinks.
“Something wrong with the liquor, bud?” he asked.
“Not a thing,” I told him.
I put the card on the bar and it was upside down. I turned it over and bent above it to make out what it said, because the light was dim.
I needn’t have read it. I already knew what it would say. There was one difference only, in a single line. Instead of “Property Management,” it said “We Deal in Everything.”
I sat there cold and huddled, perched upon the stool. The place was so dim that it had a foggy look, and there was a rumble of disconnected human talk that somehow sounded not too human but like the
gabbling of monsters or the hoots of idiots. And through it, and above it, and in between the talk, the piano still was tinkling like a dirty joke.
I gulped the Scotch and sat there with the glass cradled in my hand. I looked around for the man behind the bar to get another one, but he had suddenly gotten busy with new customers.
Someone leaned on the bar beside me, and his elbow jogged the Manhattan and the glass went over. The drink spread out like a coat of dirty oil across the polished wood and the stem of the glass snapped off close up against the bowl and the bowl was shattered. The cherry rolled along the bar and stopped at its very edge.
“I’m sorry,” said the man. “It was clumsy of me. I’ll buy
another one.”
“Never mind,” I told him. “She isn’t coming back.”
I slid off the stool and made it to the door.
A cab was cruising past, and I stepped out and hailed it.
XIII
The last light of the day had faded from the sky and the streetlights were on. I saw that a clock set up on a corner in front of a bank said it was almost six-thirty. I’d have to get a hustle on, for I had a date at seven and Joy, more than likely, would be fairly well burned up if I should turn up late.
“Going to be a great night for coon hunting,” said the cabby. “It is warm and soft, and in just a little while the moon will be coming up. I wish I could get out, but I got to work tonight. Me and another fellow, we have got a dog. A black and tan. He has got the sweetest mouth that you’ve ever listened to.”
“You’re a coon hunter,” I said, making it half a question, but not entirely so. Not that I was interested, but it was clear the man expected some reaction from me.
It was all he needed. Probably all he had expected.
“Been one man and boy,” he told me. “My old pappy, he use to take me out when I was nine or ten years old. I tell you, mister, it gets into your blood. Come a night like this and you can hardly stand it, wanting to be out there. There’s something about the way the woods smell at this time of year and there’s the special noise the wind makes in the trees when the leaves are loosening and you can feel the frost just around the corner.”
“Where do you go to hunt?”
“Out west, forty or fifty miles. Up the river. Lots of timber in the river bottom.”
“You get lots of coons?”
“Ain’t the coons you get,” he said. “Lots of nights you go out and you come back with nothing. The coons maybe are just an excuse for getting out in the woods at night. There ain’t enough people get out into the woods, at night or any other time. I ain’t the kind of guy that goes around spouting about communing with nature, but I tell you, friend, if you spent some time with her, you’re a better man.”
I settled back in the seat and watched the blocks slide past. It was still the same old city I had known, and yet it seemed to me that now there was a leering quality about it, as if sly shapes might be peering out at one from the shadowed angles of the darkened buildings.
The driver asked me: “You never went coon hunting?”
“No, I never have. I do some duck hunting and sometimes go out to South Dakota for the pheasants.”
“Yeah,” he said, “I like ducks and pheasants, too. But when you come to coons, they are something special.”
He was silent for a moment, and then he said: “I guess, though, it’s each man to his own. With you it’s ducks and pheasants and with me it’s coons. And I know a man, a real gone old geezer, that messes around with skunks. • He don’t think there’s nothing like a skunk. He makes friends with them. I swear he talks to them. He clucks and coos at them and they walk right up to him and climb up in his lap and let him pet them like a cat. Then, like as not, they go trailing home with him, like a happy dog. I tell you, it is unbelievable. It would scare you to see how he gets along with them. He lives in a shack out in the river hills and the place plumb crawls with skunks. He’s writing a book about them. He showed me the book. He’s writing it with pencil on a common dime-store tablet—the rough kind of paper that kids use at school. He sits there hunched over the table with a stub of a pencil he has to lick every now and then when it gets too faint, writing away at that book in the light of a smoky old lantern setting on the table. But, I tell you, mister, he can’t write for shucks and his spelling’s something terrible. And it’s a downright pity. For he’s got a book to write.”
“That’s the way it goes,” I told him.
He drove along in silence for a while.
“Your place next block, isn’t it?” he asked.
I told him that it was.
He pulled up in front of the apartment and I got out.
“Some night,” he said, “how about a coon hunt with me? Start six o’clock or so.”
“That would be fine,” I said.
“The name is Larry Higgins. You’ll find me in the phone book. Call me any time.”
I told him that I would.
XIV
I climbed the stairs, and in front of my door someone had replaced the semicircle that had been cut out of the carpeting. I almost didn’t notice it because the light bulb in the ceiling was dimmer, if possible, than it had been before.
I almost stepped into the semicircle before I saw the carpet had been mended. I wasn’t thinking about the carpeting. There was too much else for a man to think about.
I stopped at the very edge of it and stood there stiffly, as a man may stand who toes a dangerous deadline. And the funny thing about it was that it was not new carpeting, but the same old worn, dirty carpeting as all the rest of it.
Was it possible, I wondered, that the caretaker could have found, hidden in some cranny, the very piece that had been cut out of the carpeting?
I got down on my knees to have a look at it and there was no sign at all that the carpet had been cut. It was as if a man had only imagined that the carpet had been cut. There was no sign of sewing and there weren’t any seams.
I ran my hand over the area where the semicircle once had been and it was carpeting. It wasn’t any phony paper spread across at trap. I felt the texture of it and the yielding thickness of it, and there was no doubt at all that it was honest fabric.
And yet I was leery of it. It had almost fooled me once and I was not inclined to let it fool me once again. I stayed there, kneeling in the hall, and above me and behind me I heard the tiny, gnatlike singing of the light bulb in the ceiling.
Slowly I got to my feet and found the key and leaned across that space of carpeting to unlock the door. Anyone who saw me would have thought that I was crazy—standing just off-center of the hall and leaning across all that space to get the door unlocked.
The lock snicked back and the door came open and I leaped across the space of replaced carpeting, never touching it, and was inside the room.
I closed the door behind me and stood with my back against it as I turned on the light.
And the room was there, waiting for me as it always waited, a place that spelled security and comfort, the place that was my home.
But a place, I reminded myself, that would continue to be my home for somewhat less than another ninety days.
And after that? I wondered. What would happen then, not only to myself, but to all those other people? What would happen to the city?
“We Deal in Everything,” the card had said. Like the old junk dealer who bought anything at all—bottles, bones, rags, anything you had. But the junk dealer had been an honest buyer. He had bought for profit. And what were these people buying for? Why was Fletcher Atwood buying? Not for profit, certainly, when he paid more than a business might be worth and then didn’t even use it.
I took off my coat and threw it in a chair. I threw my hat on top of it. At the desk I dug out the phone directory and turned the pages to the Atwoods. There were a lot of them, but no Fletcher Atwood. There wasn’t any Atwood, even, who had an F initial. So I dialed information.
She had a look then told me, in her singsong
voice: “We have no such party listed.”
I hung up the phone and wondered what to do.
Here was an emergency that cried aloud for action, and how did one get action? And if you got the action, what would the action be? What do you do, what can you do, if someone buys a city?
And, first ef all, how would you explain it so someone would believe you?
I ran through the list of names and none of them was hopeful. There was the Old Man, of course, and he was the one I should spill my guts to, if for no other reason than that I worked for him. But if I should even hint at what was happening, he probably would fire me as a rank incompetent.
There were the mayor and the police chief or possibly some judicial officer, like the county prosecutor or the attorney general, but if I even breathed it to any one of them, I would either get a quick brush-off as another crackpot or find myself locked up.
There was always, I told myself, Senator Roger Hill. Rog just might listen to me.
I put out my hand to pick up the phone, then pulled it back again.
When I got through to Washington, what exactly was it that I had to tell him?
I reviewed it in my mind: “Look, Rog, someone is trying to buy up the city. I broke into an office and I found the papers and there was this rack of clothes and a shoe box full of dolls and a big hole in the wall…”
It was too ridiculous to even think about, too fantastic to hope that anyone would take it seriously. If someone had tried to tell me that sort of story, I would have figured he was some kind of nut or other.
Before I went to anyone, I had to get more evidence. I had to nail it down. I had to be able to show who and how and why and I had to do it fast. There was a place to start and that was Fletcher Atwood. Wherever he might be, he was the man to find. I knew two solid things about him. He had no telephone and years ago he’d bought the Belmont place out on Timber Lane. There was some question, of course, that he had ever lived there, but it would be a place to start. Even if Atwood were not there, even if he never had been there, it was possible one would find something in the house that might be a help in picking up his trail.