The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps

Chapter Three

Fall-Guy

Bly went out into the hall. He was so blindly indignant at the manhandling he had received that it wasn’t until he had reached his own room that the reaction began to take effect. When he fumbled for his key, he found that he was still carrying the paper sack with the two hamburgers inside.

The odor of them and the feel of their warmness seeping through the wrappings against his palm suddenly sickened him. He went very quickly through his apartment and dropped them, still wrapped, into the garbage pail on the enclosed back porch. He sat down then in the living-room and drew several deep steadying breaths. He noticed that his forehead was wet with nervous perspiration.

Bly had never before run into violent and criminal death, and coming as it had without the slightest warning made it seem like a hazily horrible nightmare. Even now he could see Patricia Fitzgerald as plainly as if she were in the same room with him — lying so queerly crumpled on the floor, with the bright red thread across her throat and the light glinting in the metallic yellow of her hair.

Back of him the door into the kitchen swung shut with a sudden creaking swish. Bly’s breath caught in his throat. He came up out of the chair and swung around, every muscle in his body achingly tense.

There was no other sound that he could hear, no other movement. He approached the door in long stealthy strides, pushed it back open again. The kitchen was as empty as it had been when he had gone through it just the moment before, but now, standing in the doorway, he could feel a distinct draft blowing against the back of his neck.

Puzzled, he turned around. The door into his bedroom was open. There was no other place from which the draft could be coming. Bly went across the living-room and turned on the light in the bedroom.

One of the two windows on the other side of his bed was open. Bly started at it, frowning. He remembered very distinctly that he had closed and locked both of the windows before he had left for work in the morning because it had looked like it might rain.

He stepped closer, and then he saw that the glass in the upper pane of the window had been broken at a spot which, had the window been closed, would have been just above the lock. Fragments of glass glinted on the floor below the window, and there was a long gouge in the white paint of the sill.

Bly turned and walked quickly out of the apartment and down the stairs to the first-floor hall. The policeman was still on guard in front of Patricia Fitzgerald’s apartment, and he surveyed Bly with evident displeasure.

“So it’s you again. What do you want now?”

Bly said: “I want to see Vargas.”

“It’s Lieutenant Vargas to you,” said the policeman. “And what do you want to see him about?”

“I’ll tell that to him.”

“O.K., smarty. He’ll throw you right out of there on your can, I hope.” The policeman opened the apartment door and announced: “Here’s that dope from upstairs again.”

Vargas and Farnham had changed places now. Vargas was sitting on the couch. He had his hat pulled down over his eyes and he looked like he was dozing. Farnham was standing in the center of the room staring gloomily at the rumpled contents of an ornamental desk he had hauled out into the middle of the floor.

“There ain’t nothing like that in here,” he said to Vargas.

“Look out in the kitchen,” Vargas ordered. “Sometimes dames stick stuff away in the coffee cups or the sugar bowl. Don’t paw around too much until the fingerprint guy gets here.” He pushed his hat-brim back and stared at Bly. “Well?”

Bly said: “There’s something upstairs — in my apartment — I think you ought to look at.”

“There’s plenty of things I ought to look at around here, if I could find them,” Vargas said. “O.K. Come on.”

The policeman said: “You want I should go along with you, Lieutenant? This guy is a suspect and—”

“If I wanted you to go along, I’d say so,” Vargas informed him. “You get out in that hall and keep your big feet and your big mouth out of this apartment.”

“Yes, sir,” said the policeman glumly.

Vargas jerked his head at Bly. “Come along.”