The Wrong Way Down (8 page)

T
HE STAIRS WERE
slippery old waxed stairs that had never been carpeted; Gamadge went down them carefully, his parcel under his right arm and his left hand on the rail. He asked himself questions to which he could find no answer.

These friends that had dropped in on Miss Iris Vance were an ill-assorted group, but they seemed to know one another well and to have an understanding. What were two toughs like Mrs. Spiker and Mr. Bowles doing in a circle that included Miss Higgs and Mr. Simpson? Miss Vance might have acquaintances in two worlds, but how had she managed to bring them together in amity?

Miss Higgs and Mr. Simpson were not toughs in the same sense that Mr. Bowles and Mrs. Spiker were toughs, but in their own way they were cool propositions; knew their way about, young as they were. Nothing soft or meek about Miss Higgs and Mr. Simpson, and Miss Higgs really seemed to think that Iris Vance had stolen the Audley portrait. Yet how meek, comparatively speaking, they had all been—even Mrs. Spiker. They had repressed themselves. Simpson was in love with Miss Vance, so far as Gamadge could tell, but his interference had been almost perfunctory, and the tough Bowles had quelled it. What were they afraid of?

Gamadge thought that they were afraid of something apart from the discovery that the picture had been changed; he was almost sure that none of them except Miss Vance had ever heard of the picture before that evening. What had worried them about it was simply that it was making trouble.

They couldn't afford trouble. Well, people who went about under false names seldom could afford it. Gamadge was reasonably certain that Miss Vance had introduced all of her friends to him by false names.

He had reached the middle of the next flight when he came to this conclusion, but at that point his thoughts were interrupted. A roar and a crash seemed to echo all around him. Startled out of his wits, he lost his footing; his feet flew out in front of him, and he came down on the edge of a step with a jar that all but dislocated his spine. The picture shot from under his arm, bounded all the way to the landing below, and unrolled itself. His dazed eye caught Lady Audley's, and to his shattered imagination she seemed to gaze at him with even more than her usual reserve.

He was dimly aware that something had hit the wainscot a little above and behind him. He turned his head, and at sight of a small splintered hole in the woodwork struggled to his feet. Harold dashed along the landing below, rounded the turn of the stair rail, and came to a stop, breathing hard. His Colt automatic was in his hand.

He asked: “Are you shot?”

“By you?” Gamadge, a hand pressed to his injured vertebrae, glared at him.

“Me? How would I hit you?”

“I don't know.” Gamadge turned again to look at the hole in the woodwork.

“That wasn't me,” said Harold. “I was shooting straight up from the lower hall. This place is built like a birdcage; you can see straight up to the top floor.”

Gamadge was still confused; he stood rubbing his spine and staring.

The door of the apartment at that end of the lower landing opened, and an old gentleman looked out into the hall, and then at the two on the stairs above him. Harold's pistol was now not in evidence.

The old gentleman came out. He wore an ancient claret-colored smoking jacket, and he had a pipe in his hand. He asked: “What was that noise?”

Harold said: “My friend fell downstairs.”

The old gentleman looked at Gamadge. “Injured?”

“Not permanently, I think.”

“I should have said that ten people fell downstairs.” Mildly disgusted, the old gentleman went back into his flat and shut the door. Harold dashed up to the top floor, but returned immediately. He said: “Nobody around. What's been going on?”

“You tell me.”

“Tell you why anybody wanted to shoot you?”

“Tell me why you fired off that forty-five of yours and scared the life out of me.”

“If I hadn't you wouldn't be alive. I was standing down there waiting for you, wondering if it was you coming down, and I saw a hand with a gun in it come over the top-floor rail. There's only one way to stop a shot—shoot first. I shot straight up, and I guess the party's gun went off out of nervousness. That”—he nodded at the hole in the wainscot—“is about where it would land.”

Gamadge repeated: “Hand with a gun in it?”

“Listen, you fell down; O.K. Didn't hit your head, did you?”

Gamadge shook it.

“Then get thinking. I said a hand with a gun in it. Hand in a dark coat-sleeve, and that's all I saw, and I was pretty good to see that, four flights up in a dim light.”

“That's why the noise seemed to come from everywhere; two guns.”

“That's right.” Harold nodded approvingly. “You're getting it now. Keep at it. Two guns. One was aimed at you, short range and no fooling. Mine scared the party off—party didn't know somebody was covering you.”

“How did you happen to be down there?”

“I didn't like the sound of the setup. You brushed me off.”

Gamadge suddenly regained his faculties. He said: “Here, give me that,” snatched the .45 from Harold's hand, stuffed it into his coat pocket, and ran up the stairs to the top floor. He put his finger on Miss Vance's bell and kept it there.

She opened the door at once. She looked very white and shaken; she was wearing a dark tweed coat, and she held a stamped addressed letter in her hand.

Gamadge asked: “Hear the row?”

“Row?”

“I fell downstairs.”

“Oh, I'm so—the elevated trains make such a noise when they go by. I never hear anything. I'm so sorry.”

They were both speaking almost absently; as if their minds were elsewhere, and there was no sense in concealing the fact.

Gamadge said: “Excuse me for bothering you, but I think I left my cigarette case.”

“Oh, did you?”

It was the timeworn excuse that didn't matter. Gamadge went past her into the living room, which was now lighted by only one shaded lamp. Miss Higgs, Mr. Simpson, Mrs. Spiker and Mr. Bowles had disappeared.

Gamadge asked shortly: “What's become of the gang? Did they dematerialize, or leave by the fire stairs?”

“They went to Miss Higgs' apartment down the hall.”

“Five B?”

“Yes. She lives there.”

“Funny. I didn't see ‘Higgs' on the manager's list in the office.”

“It's a sublet.”

“Oh. These are nice flats—mind if I look over yours, now I'm here?”

Again without apology, he walked down an inner passage; past a small dining room, a bedroom, a kitchen. At the end of the passage there was a bath. Nobody anywhere. He came back.

“Very nice,” he said. “I'm being rude, but it's such a shock to fall downstairs. Well, good night again, and thanks for putting in a good word for me—I suppose you did?”

She looked at him blankly.

“But it didn't do any good. Well, I've been lucky. Let me mail your letter for you.”

She yielded it up without a word. He passed her, went along the front hall to the door, let himself out, and closed the door behind him.

Harold was where Gamadge had left him, digging at the hole in the woodwork with his pocketknife. He held up a bullet. “It's a little one. Did you get the gun it came out of?”

“I wasn't fool enough to try.” Gamadge went on down to the foot of the stairs, picked up the aquatint, and rolled it, “Come on.”

Harold followed him. “What did you go up there for, then? I thought you were going to stand them all up with my pistol.”

“What for? The gun you saw probably left the building some time ago by way of the fire stairs. There must be an alley to Third Avenue. Miss Vance had four friends with her—she says they're now in Five B. Why tackle them? I couldn't establish identities, that's for the police. I couldn't do much with one gun against perhaps three. I went back principally to show Miss Vance that I was alive.”

“You have a right to be dead twice over—going up there to that flat alone.”

“They wouldn't shoot me in her flat. They could have shot me before if they'd been willing to do it up there. But a casualty on the stairs—that's different. Plenty of robberies with violence now, people sneaking into apartment buildings and committing murder; and there's always the fire exit. But I'd better tell you the story, so that you'll know what I'm talking about.”

As they left the building, Harold remarked that everybody in it, including the superintendent, seemed to be at the movies or sound asleep, except the old gentleman who thought two guns going off—one of them a forty-five calibre Colt automatic—sounded like people falling downstairs.

“The flats have long passageways to the living rooms, and an inside hall. And as Miss Vance reminded me, the elevated runs past the East end of the house.”

They got into the car, and Gamadge started it. He said: “By the way, I haven't expressed my gratitude.”

“Never mind it,” replied Harold with dignity. “I wouldn't want you to get mushy about it.”

“I was preoccupied. Thanks for my life. I still don't know why you thought it necessary to come. These people don't make much sense to me.”

“Or to me. I wanted to mention that. But after you left I kept thinking that these mediums have tough friends, and they don't like a showdown, and the whole business seemed bigger to me than it did to you.”

“It is bigger. Miss Vance says she isn't a medium.”

“No?”

“Hasn't even pretended to supernatural powers for ten years. I'm inclined to believe her.”

“She has tough friends, though.”

“Evidently. Two, at least.” Gamadge described the party in detail.

When he had finished, Harold said: “You certainly busted in on something. You say the Vance girl had a dark-brown coat on when you went back to the flat. Probably on her way out to see whether you were really killed or not. Don't think too much about that friendly warning she gave you, you only imagined she meant to warn you. Where's that letter she said she was going to mail?”

Gamadge fished it out of his pocket. Harold looked at it. It was addressed to a well-known advertising company.

“Fits in with the commercial art job,” he said. “I'm glad something fits in.” He added, as the car swung around a corner, “Hey, why are you going to Park?”

“You don't suppose I'd leave Miss Paxton in a thing like this if there's shooting in it? She's getting out of that house tonight if I have to pack for her myself. If she won't move, I'll stay there till she does.”

“But it wouldn't make
any
sense for them to get after her now; you got away. Their gunman knew that, anyhow.”

“It wouldn't make sense, but I don't understand how their minds work; neither, from what you said a while ago, do you. There isn't a chance in a thousand that she's in any danger, but I won't take even part of a chance.”

“With you loose they'd never touch her in the world. You'd establish a connection with Vance. They couldn't risk it.”

“For some reason they risked having a shot at me.”

“Yes, and if they'd got you Miss Paxton would have set the police on them. And if they got you both they'd still be risking their necks on the chance that you hadn't said anything about the case to anybody else. Some risk. You'd talked to me.”

“And I wrote to Clara. I didn't say much, but I said enough.”

“Perhaps they're all so dog-goned stupid they think there isn't enough connection. Miss Paxton tells you something about a picture that can't be proved, you come to see Miss Vance about it, and a robber shoots at you in the outside hall.”

“They're not stupid.”

“It certainly looks as though you never had a dog's chance—if I hadn't happened to show up—of getting out of the place alive tonight. The sequence of events—not a hitch in it. You telephone Vance, making an appointment; you've mentioned Miss Paxton to her, and that's enough—the whole gang has to sit in on it and hear what you have to say. Vance puts the hour late, so that they can all be there.

“When you get there they're all under a strain. You produce the picture—”

“Slight hitch at that point,” said Gamadge. “None of them except Miss Vance seemed to know anything about it, and Miss Higgs seemed to think Miss Vance did steal it. And she didn't care who knew that she thought so.”

“Never mind, you're making trouble for Miss Vance and sticking to it that something's wrong. You've brought the Ashbury house into it. You're dead. Vance told you that ghost story to keep you there late. What time was it when you didn't get shot?”

“Just after eleven.”

“Halls apt to be clear, people home and settling down. It's all there,” said Harold, “and it doesn't add up to a thing.”