A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

He was well satisfied as he hung up. The man on the other end made him smile, with his melodramatic antics, his stage waits on picking up the phone, his cryptic conversations, and the rest of his cover-up gymnastics — all of which were as out of date in today’s hard-shelled, gear-stripped world as a man’s opera cape or a mushroom-shaped helmet on a cop. The police themselves would have been the first to laugh at him. The man probably had read too many dime novels when he was a boy, or else he had an ineradicable sense of guilt about not having stayed honest, which expressed itself in this form. But he was reliable. He delivered the goods — when you laid cash on the line.

Nothing to do now but raise the money and wait. And strangely enough, he enjoyed the waiting too. It made him feel twice as good. It added a spice to the enterprise. It was like doing it over twice, once in contemplation and once in commission.

He stretched out across the threadbare sofa in one long, straight, unbroken line from the top of his head to the backs of his heels, and made a cushion of his clasped hands and placed them at the back of his head for a head-rest. A little table-top radio beside him, which he had flicked on, warmed up and cut in with almost bull’s-eye patness on a deep-throated woman growling a blues: “There’s gonna be some shooting like there never was befoa, And the undertaker-man is gonna knock upon his doa—”

“Sing it, lady, sing it,” he urged.

It may feel bad at first when you’re wronged or damaged or trampled on in some way there’s no forgiving, but it feels good later to kill the man you hate for doing it to you. It sure feels good, he exulted.

It feels like a drink on the house.

It feels like a Cadillac all your own.

It feels like when the dice come up with your point, and the floor is papered with other people’s money.

It feels like when a beautiful blonde runs her fingers through your hair, and then throws away her shoes because she says she’s never going to walk away from there again.

It feels even better than all those things put together.

When he returned to the hotel at eleven the next night, he had the gun.

Dade wasn’t back in his room yet — he could tell because he glimpsed the key still sticking out in the mail box adjoining his, when he stopped at the desk to pick up his own. Not that this was an infallible guarantee; most hotels kept spares in their mail boxes, in case a guest locked himself out and had left the key inside the room.

He preferred it this way— Dade not yet in. It could give him time to get things warmed up inside of him.

He went into his own room, closed the door, and made the few, very minor preparations there were indicated — and they were far less complicated and taxing than those required on many less crucial occasions, he reflected.

First, he adjusted his door so that it could open at one clean sweep, without the interruption hitch of freeing the latch by turning the knob, and without the accompanying warning sound this would give. In other words, the door was left open a narrow crack — but this couldn’t be detected unless it was peered at closely from either side.

Next, he took the telephone directory, which each room was supplied with, from under the nightstand and stood it up on end against the wall just inside the door, in readiness for its particular use. To make it even more suitable to the purpose he had in mind for it, the hotel had encased each directory in its own stiff binding, with the name of the hotel and the room number stamped at the top. The binding made the directory rigid and unbendable.

Finally, he checked the gun — but this was purely a fidget reflex, not a necessity, for it had been turned over to him in perfect readiness.

After that he spent the time walking aimlessly around the room — not wanting to sit down, for some unfathomable reason — touching various objects at random as he passed them, without even knowing he was doing so. Now the edge of the dresser, now the comer of the bed, now the back of a chair. Once he turned off a lamp as he went by it, then immediately turned it on again in the course of the same stride. A number of times he tightened and loosened his necktie, and once he lifted his foot to the arm of a chair, and undid, then retied the shoelace. All for some unknown reason.

The behavior pattern of a particular man passing the time while waiting to commit a murder.

The one thing he did not do was the one thing he might have been expected to do the most — smoke. Perhaps he did not want to be caught with one in his hand, if Dade unexpectedly showed up, and not know what to do with it, where to put it. Even infinitesimal things like that can throw a timetable off balance.