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

But there was nothing he could do.

He went tumbling in headlong, beyond all escape and all recovery.

The book wasn’t in here. It was in there.

“You better come along with us,” was the next remark. No more questioning, no more fooling around. All business now — deadly business.

“We checked every room on this floor. Every room but two has one directory in it. Standard equipment. One room has two in it. Where he died. One has none. This one.”

They took a half-tum twist in his coat sleeve, one on each side of him.

“That doesn’t place me in there,” he said stubbornly. “How do you know it belongs in here? It might have come from somewhere else.”

“Each directory is in a special hotel-binding. With the hotel’s name stamped on the top of it. And the number of the room it belongs in. The second one in there has 211 at the top big as life.”

One of them closed the door after the three of them with his free hand.

The Do Not Disturb sign on the opposite door seemed to mock Killare as he went past it. It even quivered a little with the draft from their passing — the way a person shakes a little when he’s laughing to himself.

Mannequin

As usual Leone was well in advance of the nightly seven o’clock stampede to quit work and go home. She was the first of them all to reach the bronze statuette with its spray of flesh-colored light-bulbs at the foot of the stairs on the main floor, while the rest of the girls were still only working their way down from the upper floors. Their clamor could be heard coming down the staircase ahead of them, they were like a bunch of noisy school-children when the dismissal-bell has rung.

“Take it easy there!” a voice ordered with phony severity as her feet came off the last step onto the marble floor with a flat, slapping impact.

Startled, she turned her head around, but without stopping, for seven o’clock was seven o’clock. It was only the lift-boy, grinning at her. “Who for? You?” she called back with arrogant unconcern as she rushed on ahead to meet the evening.

Then she remembered just in time, and stopped short while still shielded by the projecting stone-trim framing the street-entrance. Cautiously, she extended just the tip of her nose and the width of one eye out beyond it for a moment’s precautionary look beforehand out where she intended going.

There he was again, big as life, waiting a few yards down the sidewalk from her, shoulders leaning back up against the building-wall. She had an unappealing (to her, anyway) glimpse of a loose-fitting knee-short olive gabardine topcoat, of a yeast-pallid complexion with a cigarette stuck into it, like a thermometer taking its owner’s temperature.

Every night now for — how long? More than a week, wasn’t it? And maybe even longer, for most likely she hadn’t noticed him right away from the start.

She’d had men hang around and follow her before — every girl does — but not like this. They’d close in after a short distance, a few yards, a block or two, tip their hats, make an opening remark — and promptly get brushed off good and solid. He didn’t do anything like this: never came any closer, never spoke or tried to speak to her. And most significant, and most unsalubrious, of all, after one or two long, hard, almost-paralyzing stares on the earlier nights, now he pretended not to be looking at her at all. She could never catch his eyes, even though she knew they had been on her only a second before, making her own respond in automatic reflex. It was this part of it that was the scariest and creepiest part of the whole thing. Being stalked is one thing, but this turned it from an amatory into a jungle-kind of thing.

In other words, he didn’t give her any chance to defend herself. How can you defend yourself when no offense has been committed — yet?

What did he want with her? What was it all about? Was he one of these screws, these oddballs, that get their kicks just looking at girls from a distance without going near them at all, and then go home and dream their dirty little dreams?