LITMIR.BIZ

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Maybe the bartender wouldn’t bother to take a look in the corridor for a little while, maybe he’d go right away. Whatever he did, time was running short.

      I found the address ten minutes later. It looked small but well-kept. Not the kind of place I would have expected a killer like Torrens to own. Maybe that ought to have warned me right away, but it didn’t. I stopped the car, got out and knocked on the door. There was no answer. I had expected none. Without waiting, I pushed the door, found it unlocked, and stepped inside, easing the Luger into my right hand, the safety catch off. It was time to face up to the trouble which I felt lay in store for me today. Sid Torrens. Exposed killer. For all I knew, he might be lying in wait for me in one of the rooms, crouched behind a door, a gun in his hands.

      I opened one of the doors swiftly, peered inside. The room was empty, the furniture neat and tidy. A little warning bell was ringing at the back of my brain, but I failed to realise what it meant or what it was warning me against. I knew the ruthless edge of cruelty that was in

      Tony Vitelli. He had seemed just a little too free with his information, even with a gun on him. I had expected him to put up more of a fight than that, but he had backed down unexpectedly.

      Something moved behind one of the other doors as I walked noiselessly over the carpet. Cautiously, I pushed it open, then kicked it hard so that it slammed back against the wall inside. Going inside, I jerked the gun around to cover the guy who sat on the bed, in the act of pushing himself up onto his elbows.

      He was a weedy-looking character, not the killer type, but you could never be sure. I watched him carefully as I eased my way around the end of the bed. If he guessed why I was there, he might try anything.

      ‘Sid Torrens?’

      ‘Yes.’ There was fear and astonishment on his face. He looked like a man trying to figure out things which were beyond his comprehension. He leaned forward with a jerk, his face twisting, his mouth working.

      ‘Tell me what happened last night.’

      ‘Last night.’ His glance wavered to the gun in my hand, and the muscles of his face were working overtime. I could see that he was getting scared. I steadied the gun and applied a little pressure. The sweat popped out on his face again and he brushed it away with the back of his hand. ‘I don’t know what you mean. Who sent you here?’

      ‘That isn’t important. Somebody killed Caroline Lomer last night. Pumped half a dozen slugs into her from close range. I had it figured that it might have been a mob killing, and you’re the trigger guy according to the information I’ve been given.’

      ‘That’s a lie! In God’s name, I don’t know anything about a murder.’

      His glaze kept flickering from my face to the gun in my hand and then back again.

      ‘The finger has been put on you, Torrens,’ I said, half-believing him. I seemed to have drawn a rotten break, but I had to make sure. ‘Stand up!’

      He swung his legs to the floor and stood up. Carefully, I checked for weapons, found nothing. He was still scared and I wanted to know why. If he’d made any attempt to go for a gun, I would have slugged him, probably killed him; and he knew it.

      ‘O.K., you’re clean. But you’re scared. Going to tell me why?’ My words sound as if they had been made of glass, brittle, ready to shatter in his face.

      ‘I don’t know who told you I was the murderer.’ His words tumbled out in a torrent from shaking lips. This guy was plain scared, I thought, scared spitless, and not only because of the gun on him. There was something more to it than that. Something I didn’t understand just then, but which I knew I would have to understand before things went much further.

      ‘I knew Caroline Lomer slightly, I’ll admit that. But I hadn’t seen her for almost ten years. I swear it.’

      ‘But you knew that somebody wanted her dead.’

      ‘No.’ There was the same taut, frightened insistence. He stood tight and tensed, a little man with a fear inside him which you could feel as if it were electric. ‘As far as I know, there was only one man who might have wanted to kill her, who hated her like he hated the rest of us enough to kill us.’

      ‘The rest of you?’

      He ran his tongue around his lips and made a helpless little gesture with his left hand. I saw him watching me furtively, still not sure of me. For all he knew, I too could be one of the hirelings of the Underworld bosses, probing into everything he knew before killing him. He seemed like a rat running around in a box, not knowing which way to turn, trapped with his back to the wall. Perhaps he’d had second thoughts on how much he was going to tell me. He may even have had me figured as somebody in league with the cops, but I didn’t think so.

      Then his gaze flicked sharply to something over my shoulder and I knew instinctively that something was about to break. I half thrust against him, to hurl him to the ground, but I was seconds too late. He went down, sagging to his knees, falling heavily against me, but he was dead before he hit the floor. There was a black circular hole between his eyes, and a vacant look on his thin, pinched features.

      Somewhere down in the street, I heard a car start. Anger, such as I had scarcely ever known before, took me by the collar and shook me hard. Dimly, from the window, I caught a glimpse of the car disappearing around the far corner. It was a big black Cadillac, like those which the Organisation used whenever their hirelings carried out their orders. No point in trying to catch up with them, or even to tail them. They would have vanished into the maze of traffic long before I got to the street.

      I went back to the body of Sid Torrens lay slumped against the wall. He wasn’t going to tell me anything he knew. There was a sharp taste in my mouth. I had an idea now of how I had been used. They had intended to kill this guy Torrens no matter how it was done, but they had carefully chosen me as their killer and unwittingly, I had almost fallen into the trap. I swore savagely. I wanted to kill them for the trick they had played on me.

      Of course, Vitelli had been in on it all the time. It had been a play on his part, pretending to be scared, to want out of the Organisation. He had been briefed well for his part. He had me fooled all the way along the line. The bigshot, acting scared, thinking all the time what a big, trusting fool Johnny Merak was; the guy that Grenville had chosen for this job because he knew all of the mobs’ methods.

      I moved a little to one side to take another look at the dead man’s face, then shook my head and stood up. What was the point in standing there looking at him? I didn’t want to look at a man I had seen killed.

      I got out fast. Unless I missed my guess, the cops would have been tipped off about the murder within seconds of it having been committed, and they’d be on their way already, sirens wailing, ready to pick up Johnny Merak on suspicion of murder. I’d have a tough job talking my way out of that one. They’d be able to bring forward plenty of evidence to show that I’d been seen talking to Tony Vitelli, a well-known killer, and the barman in the Golden Horseshoe would willingly testify to the fact that he had heard Vitelli give me the address where I might find Torrens.

      Sirens were wailing a dismal dirge as I swung the Merc around the corner and headed back to the Office. I needed time in which to think. Events were happening a little too fast for me. Two murders in as many days, one of them in front of my eyes. I felt urged into activity by a new anxiety. Torrens, before he had died, had said that there was one man who hated Caroline Lomer, himself, and the rest enough to kill them.

      What did that mean? It seemed highly likely that he had been killed because of what he might have told me. They hadn’t trusted me once Vitelli had given me the address where I might locate Torrens. Wanting him out of the way, playing me for a sucker, they had sent me to kill him. But they had to be sure, and it was possible that here they had overplayed their hand. They had killed him using a silenced weapon, possibly the same weapon as that used to kill Caroline Lomer.

      That wouldn’t be difficult to check. But of one thing I felt reasonably sure, Vitelli wasn’t the killer. That dark, shadowy figure still remained in the background. The nearest I had got to him yet

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