Brush Babe’s Poison Pallet
Bruce Cassiday

I - Last-Mile Lane

It was a street of crooked turnings and twisted doorways and sagging roofs. It was a crooked street walked by crooked people and watched over by crooked devils in the sky. A brooding and evil darkness stood guard above it, shutting off the light of the heavens.
Many men had come down this twisting, narrow, tortuous lane and had never come back. It was a street of lost souls, a street of barter where the costliest memories were traded for the cheapest coin. The roadway to hell, this street.
Last-Mile Lane, Greenwich Village, Manhattan.
Five minutes from Times Square. Five minutes from the crystalline splendour of Rockefeller Centre. Five minutes from eternity.
A man stood on a corner of the winding lane, staring up at the street sign. It was pitch black and heavy clouds hung under the moon, squatting over the upended, sagging eaves of the ageing structures.
The man was tall and lean and he stood there with an air of anxiety. He was a man who had read the end of a grim, grisly story on the grey etchings of a tombstone, and who must now trace through that unhappy history from its sordid beginning to its tragic end.
He snapped his thumb across a match and the flame leaped out into the darkness. The yellow-red glow painted his face bright and fine against the dancing, grotesque shadows about him. The letters of the sign burned black in the night-Last-Mile Lane.
His eyes were wide and deep set, and his forehead was high and pale. His hair, even in the flickering, shimmering match-light, was carroty red, stiff, wiry. His eyes glittered in the glowing illumination, green as the shattered glass of a beer bottle. His face was pale cream, dumped with teenage freckles that would never fade away.
Robert Sands. Red Sands.
Red Sands had a clown’s face with quirks in the corners of the mouth and deep lines etched in the forehead. He also had the capacity, like any clown, of carrying an angry, determined man’s spirit in a laughing, devil-may-care man’s body.
Lighting the cigarette there in the dancing, inky blackness, Red Sands had the look of a lobo on the stalk, a hunter on the trail, a searcher for the lost in a barren, destroyed universe. The cold, crisp wind from down the crooked alleyway crawled along the ground, licking like a hungry puppy at the cuffs and sleeves of his suit.
And then suddenly Sands waved the match out with a desperate, almost terrified flick of the wrist. The cigarette glowed crimson in the black air. Sands sucked in air tightly to his backbone, and his hand crept into his jacket pocket. The smooth, reassuring barrel of his .38 Police Positive leaped into his shaking fingers.
Sands melted into the ebon shadows of an unpainted store front. With the sweat oozing out clammily onto his body, he pulled himself flat to the wall, listening. His heart beats slowed, his nerves tingled.
Yes. Faintly, imperceptibly, he could hear the sound down the crooked, twisting lane-the slow, measured movement of cat feet.
They had picked up his trail again. They or he. He or it. Whatever had tracked Red Sands unseen through the brilliant light of day, through the black shadows of night, through the swirling fog of morning. It had followed him here, too. Whatever it was that meant to keep Red Sands from finding the hide-out of the fugitive girl called Jennie Gomez whose sanctuary was here in the twisting wilderness of Greenwich Village. It had picked up his trail again; it was out to finish him off.
Two misses were enough. Once in the subway station in the dead of morning-a hurtling dark form coming out of a corner, stumbling into Sands, shoving him forward towards the tracks in front of the onrushing express. Again in a darkened, mist-shrouded alleyway-a violently swung wooden crate slammed into Sands’s hip, sprawling him helplessly in the path of an onrushing taxi.
Two tries within the three nights of his search for Jennie Gomez.
The breath of fear crawled along the sweaty backbone of Red Sands, and he listened again. Slithering like a snake through the tar-like opaque night, the thing came towards him along the bent, broken street. Sands slid out the .38 Colt and flicked the safety. The click of the metal rattled like the devil’s bones in the silence about him.
No air stirred. Blackness closed down over him like ink-soaked cotton. His eyes burnt, his chest throbbed, his soles itched. Involuntarily, Sands’s mouth dropped open and a gasp grated out of his constricted throat.
The motion stopped. The monster paused. The thing considered, puckered up its brows-if it had any-and uncoiled from its unseen, imagined shape.
Suddenly, whimpering like a sickened puppy, Sands blasted away desperately in the darkness with the Colt, once, twice, three times. The blinding, infra-red mushroom of gun flame smeared the darkness with a glowing smoky paint. A towering and twisted form loomed over him. Shadow? Mass? Human?
A tremendous force like the crash of a falling building tore at his hand. The gun sailed out into the darkness, and he heard it clatter angrily down the sign: Last-Mile Lane. It lay still, the gun-a useless pawn in this strange, eerie game of death.
An exploding, destructive horror tore at Sands’s body-a smashing, paralysing force-and he was enmeshed in its trance-like, helpless terror. His arms flailed at the thing, his hands beat at the shapeless mass of strength, his knees gouged into the monster.
The shape was not human. They were not hands coming at him. They were strange taloned tentacles-hard, brittle, horned at the ends. A viscid, almost puffy mass breathed into his face, and the breath was stale. Grunts of exhaustion and fatigue came from the strange shape, but still Sands could see nothing.
They struggled there in the dark, two half-maddened beasts-neither one able to see the other distinctly. The monster and the hunter. The hunter raged blindly, fanning his arms like windmills, smashing his tough, wiry knuckles into the monster’s face, chest, stomach. Panting, terrified, hysterical with dread, Sands fought insanely, like a madman, like a wounded bobcat that would not die.
He fought desperately, crazily, fearlessly, until the blackness came, and even after he was past the realm of knowledge he was pummelling the beast entwining him with its sinewy tentacles.
Crying out suddenly with a weird coyote-like call in the night, the monster backed up, panting, breathing heavily, whimpering, and without a further attempt at assault, it slithered down the black alleyway, limping, hitching itself along like a broken-backed vertebrate.
Sands lay there in a pool of his own blood.
The bar was a pleasant little underground cellar, built in the style of an Old English country pub. Dark-oak beams, carved and ornate, gave a Victorian London tone to the bar. It was called the Thackeray Room.
A row of windows high above the back of the bar gave out onto the dark Greenwich Village street. The occasional flash of a passerby’s foot moved swiftly from left to right, from right to left.
A student slumbered in the corner of the bar, over a glass of ale and a calculus manual. A pair of girls stared at each other over two enormous mugs of black brew. The sleepy barkeep drowsily moved his amber coloured eyes from one side of the bar to the other to keep awake. He wandered up and down, rubbing glasses dry with a wet towel. His barrel chest and his powerful shoulders were covered with a soiled white apron.
On the opposite wall of the tavern hung a series of twelve oil paintings.
One portrait in particular stood out from the rest. It was the portrait of a woman. She had dark eyes, brooding, liquid, expressive. On her mouth curved a mocking, magnetic smile, and her lip held a contemptuous, scornful amusement. On her face was imprinted a cursed, unnatural beauty. There was too much of it for one woman to have.
Suddenly the barkeep turned from his glasses and glanced up into the street outside, viewing the darkness through the windows above the back bar. Instantly he gasped and almost dropped the glass in his hands.
Through the window stared the bloody, torn, bruised face of a man lying stretched out there full length on the sidewalk. The man’s face was pale and freckled, and his mouth was twisted and beaten in. His eyes were torn with pain, and he lifted a hand feebly to scratch on the window. Then his eyes closed and he passed out, sprawled there on the cement walk, and the blood grew in a pool around him.
The barkeep knew his onions. He filled the unconscious man with strong brandy and slapped his face. He bandaged the cut and bleeding wounds, and finally Red Sands opened his glazed eyes and groaned.
The world was swirling about him painfully, and when he could focus his eyes he made out the walnut woodwork of the bar and the amber eyes of the barkeep and the brown brandy taste in his mouth. He sat up groggily, rubbing his face with his hand. He touched bruises and bandages and dried blood.
“Thanks, pal,” he whispered to the barkeep. “Thanks a lot.”
Shaking his head to clear out the cobwebs, Sands looked about at the interior of the bar. The two girls were staring glassily at him, and the calculus student in the corner was dozing over his ale. Sands turned back to the barkeep and grinned.
“Sorry, pal. Guess I kind of passed out.”
“Forget it,” said the barkeep. “Run into an uptown express?”
Suddenly remembering something, Sands reached into his jacket pocket. Oddly his .38 Colt was there.
“Last-Mile Lane,” Sands mumbled. “Last-Mile is right.”
The barkeep whistled. “Rough as a cob. Stay the hell out of that hole after this.”
Sands grinned, and his clown’s face crinkled at all its corners. “Don’t worry about that.”
His voice trailed off. Inside he turned to ice and glass. There was no place for air to go in his chest. He could see it plainly, and even when he closed his eyes and shook his head and opened them again he could see it. There was no doubt about it.
He turned his dazed, staring eyes to the barkeep. “Who’s that girl? Where does she live?”
His eyes followed the direction of Sands’s. They both stared at the portrait of the dark, brooding girl.
It was Jennie Gomez. And seeing her there in that picture again after all these years brought the roaring back in his ears, the swimming mists in front of his eyes, and the twisting, stabbing hell in his guts. It was as if all the love and hate and joy and grief in the world had come to Red Sands from that one girl.
He remembered it all clearly from the first sight of her lovely, sad face, to the sight of the last broken, crushed cigarette butt smeared with her lipstick. The story of Red Sands, the story of the sell-out that backfired.
As an FBI agent five years ago Red Sands had been sent to find Jennie Gomez and bring her in for questioning by the Department of Justice concerning the whereabouts of her brother, Danny Gomez. Gomez was an artist-some said the best primitive oil painter of the twentieth century-but since the beginning of the Spanish Revolution he had fought in Europe and had joined the spyring of a European power.
From successful oil painter Gomez had turned into one of the most fabulous of international agents, and his score had been all ten of the US State Department operatives sent to tail him.
Sands had found Jennie Gomez, and had been suckered into the perfect sell-out double-cross. He’d run out with Jennie Gomez, but she had two-timed him and vanished. Sands had been drummed out of the FBI, escaping imprisonment only because of his record.
Danny Gomez had been killed in World War II, captured by the Germans while fighting for another European power. And then two years later ten portraits of Gomez’s-owned by Hamlin Bell, a rich collector of bizarre objects of art and a nut on the subject of primitive modern oils-had disappeared from Bell’s apartment in Manhattan.
Bell’s private operatives had traced the theft through fences to Jennie Gomez, but she was not in the United States and could not be located. Three weeks ago, however, word crept through the grapevine that Jennie Gomez was back in the States.
Hamlin Bell, tracing through the history of Red Sands-ex-FBI agent-had hit upon him as the man to find Jennie Gomez. Sands had refused at first, but the healthy fee Bell offered had finally convinced him that stalking brunettes might be better than stalking gold in 1949, and he had taken the job.
And now here hung the portrait of Jennie Gomez. And what made Sands’s jaw unhinge like a steam-shovel scoop was the fact that he recognised the artist. Jennie Gomez had painted her own portrait. And she was trying to gather in a few extra bucks by hanging it in the bar here-in case anybody wanted to buy it.
Amber Eyes was studying Sands intently. “Forget about her,” snapped the barkeep. “I can’t remember where she went. She ain’t for sale. She’s labelled poison, and she comes in doses of trouble.”
Sands rubbed his bruised jaw. “How’s your art appreciation?” mused Sands, watching the eyes of the bartender closely. The barkeep stared back intently.
“I don’t get you.”
“Let me put it this way. Go in for vegetables? Cabbage? Lettuce? Moola?”
“Moola,” repeated the barkeep, rubbing his chin with his finger. “That’s quite a salad. Green, ain’t it? Green with alphabet noodles. Vs. I’s. X’s. Art pictures of Washington DC celebrities.”
“You’ve got the taste of a gourmet,” nodded Sands. “Like to gum down a couple or twenty leaves of the stuff, friend?”
Amber Eyes stared into the ceiling. “You twisted my arm, buddy. Funny how my mouth keeps droolin’ for that wonderful moola stuff.”
Sands handed over the twenty, and the custodian of the Thackeray Room suddenly recovered his impaired memory.

II - The Big Sell-Out

Jennie Gomez was a dark, handsome girl with black eyes and black hair and a black past. She was built from head to toe with the loving care of a master craftsman. If he earned the last dollar in the world for his work he came away underpaid. She was long and graceful, and her arms were smooth and cream-coloured. Her eyes smouldered with savage fire, and her mouth was full and strong and dusky.
Inside her gnawed a futile, knowing sadness-she had too much life to live and too little time to live it in. Happiness was a fragile thing and it broke to pieces in her hands, no matter how carefully she handled it.
She was standing behind the door when she opened it for Red Sands, and he could feel the terrible jolting shock deep in his guts as he faced her and moved into the room towards her. Instinctively he knew that she felt the same thing for him.
He stepped inside and closed the door.
“Jen,” he said. “You double-crossing little rat. Hello, baby.”
She untied her smock and smoothed her dress as she moved away from him. She turned in the middle of the room and smiled at him.
“Sucker,” she said. “So you found me after all. The big red-headed chump. Think you can bring home the bacon this time? I’ll deadbeat you again, Red, I swear I will. The deck is stacked against you.”
She came over to him. The smile on her face seemed pasted there. She held out one hand to him, but she did not touch him.
Sands talked and his mouth had dry flour in it. “You string along with me, Jen, and there’ll be no trouble at all. I won’t even stick a .38 Colt in your back if you hand over those Hamlin Bell pictures.” He moved over and slowly sat on the couch, gripping the .38 tightly.
She sat down beside him, watching him. Then she turned away and leaned back luxuriously into the depths of the couch.
He went on talking. “Just between you and me and that Jennie Gomez painting there on the floor, one wrong peep, and it’ll be the last. Baby, I and this .38 Special of mine ain’t playing.”
“Danny took all the pictures with him the last time he went to Italy. Didn’t you know he was killed over there?”
He stared at her steadily. “That’s a lie,” he said from the troubled, hard pit of his stomach. His eyes were glassy and his jaw was built out of cement. He saw her through the tight glaze of his eyes. It was impossible that this lovely lady had sold him down the river once before. It was impossible that Red Sands was in practically the same unenviable position as before, tracking down the only girl he had ever loved, for a rich man with a penchant for the primitive oils of Gomez.
“You’ve got those pictures,” he said huskily. “Let’s stop beating around the mulberry bush. Let’s get down to brass monkeys.”
She smiled and shook her head. Her face was close to his and her eyes were turned up into his pleadingly. They were warm and steady and her lips were vibrant and smooth.
Cursing raspingly, he ground out the words. “I’ve got to get them, Jen. I’ll kill you if you try to stop me! You hear? I’ll kill you this time.”
She leaped back and her hand touched his. She was shaking her head slowly, sadly. “No, Red,” she said. “I don’t have them.”
He turned to her, the flames of rage boiling up inside him. He took her shoulder in his hand.
“Oh, Red,” she said. Her hand came up to his cheek.
Anger surged up in him and he wanted to cry out: “This is it, you black-haired Judas! You double-dealing Delilah! Get me those pictures or I’ll blast you to hell and gone!”
He reached out his other hand and took her in his arms and kissed her, cursing to himself that it should be so, burning with a helpless anger. But he could do nothing but hold her tightly and kiss her again.
He lifted one feeble hand to his jacket pocket for the .38 Colt, but the moment his fingers touched the cold steel he knew it was no use.
He knew again that she had beaten him, that this time was the last time anyone could defeat him, that he was finished, that he was no longer a man but a beaten, trampled-on hulk, that he would never again walk with his head high.
Her soft, gentle voice came to him like silk in his ears.
“Jen,” he whispered, and all the love in the world was in that one word. Inside his heart cold hate chewed and gnawed at him for the memory of the man that had been, once....
He came out of it with a violent start. For a long moment he could remember nothing, and the room rocked and pitched dizzily about him. It was a tall room with an infinite blue space stretching along one entire wall. His eyes focused hazily.
A long endless sheet of glass stretched from the floor to the ceiling along one end of the room. The panes of glass were embedded in the frame of the wall with strips of lead. Through the glass he could see blue-black sky, stars by the millions, high buildings in the distance, and dark trees below.
Washington Square. Manhattan. Midnight.
He remembered the girl and he remembered the wine they had finished off-wine out of a French bottle. Rhenish wine. And that was all he could remember. That old Rhenish wine had been vin a la Finn Mickey-and that was the fiery, deadly liquid that had drawn the curtain of lethe over him.
Damn her. A Mickey Finn! She’d knocked him out and made off with those pictures!
He tensed to tear himself up out of the chair where he was slumped. But as he did so the sound came to him again. Startled, he realised that the rustling movement in the next room must have been the thing that had roused him in the first place.
Cold dread rinsed through him. A twisted, cockeyed picture of a darkened, crooked lane, and the hideous phantom shape that had loomed above him in the pitch black of night came back to him. The sound in the other room was the cat-like movement of that same misshapen monster.
Sands slid onto the floor and moved along the rug soundlessly. He reached for his gun, but his hand came out of his jacket empty. Cursing, he slid his hands through his other pockets. No rod.
The sound slithered closer to the door and Sands pressed himself against the wall. Jennie Gomez? Where was Jennie? Besides the clear-cut vision of her sitting across from him, sipping the lovely, killable Rhenish wine, he could bring back no other memory of her.
Creaking, the door opened a slit. Sands slid along the wall, grasping desperately for a chair that stood in his path.
It was too dark to see well, but Sands could make out the moving mass of flesh slipping into the studio room from the bedroom. With a flying lunge, Sands threw the chair down over the head, and the whole thing splintered with a tearing, ripping sound that smashed about between the tight walls of the studio. A sudden grunt, and then a low-pitched laugh from the creature filled the room.
Sands hurtled himself for the beast, but it moved swiftly across the room to the door. Sands grasped one foot, and the bare flesh trembled under his palm. The thing hitched, stumbled and smashed head first into the wall.
Guttering forth cries of pain and anguish, the creature pulled itself into a knotted, hunched ball and withdrew from Sands’s groping hands. Sands jumped to his feet and dived at the crouched shape. The shape hissed and spluttered and suddenly lashed out at Sands.
A force like a speeding subway crashed into him. Sands sprawled back across the hard oak floor, skidding along on his shoulder and spine. The hot sting of scraped flesh shot tremors through his body. Through the flashing, shattered red and black shimmering before his eyes, he could see the shape draw itself up.
Tearing open the hall doorway, the thing threw itself out into the blackened walk-up and disappeared. Sands ran into the companionway, stumbling and gasping. Dazedly he leaned far out over the balustrade. There was no movement at all in the stair well. The darkness of endless night had swallowed the creature up.
Trembling there, Sands stood, clinging to the stair rail, listening desperately for any sound. He heard nothing.
After a long, fruitless moment, Sands moved back into the studio room, and tiny prickles of fear wormed along his spine. Jennie. Where was Jennie Gomez? Maybe she was not the one who had doped that wine. Maybe the beast had lain in wait for both of them. Maybe the thing was trying not only to kill Sands, but Jennie Gomez as well. Maybe...
Hastily he stepped across the room and tore open her door. Her light was on, projecting its yellow rays in a cone-like shape over her bed. He saw her all right. She was sprawled out across the bed, the covers dragged halfway with her towards the floor. The sheets were twisted about her sliding body, as if she had tried vainly to struggle out of the bed of death half unconscious, half fainting. Blood was smeared in clotting streaks.
Sands gasped and turned away, gripping the door in his hands, digging his nails into the soft wood. He steadied himself and then moved into the room. Yes, of course, he thought drearily. His .38 Colt was there, plain to see, lying in the centre of the rug.
He stooped over to pick it up.
What was the use now? The bullet would match the barrel of the gun. Even a blind ballistics expert could tell that. If he got rid of the gun they still have it on record in the New York files. He had a perfect motive. Jennie Gomez had suckered him out of the FBI. He’d found her again, they’d fought, he’d killed her.
Bell would never back him to help him out of this mess.
Bell had hired him to get pictures, not to knock off a human being.
Somebody had built a beautiful frame around him. In the shake of a dead lamb’s tail they’d have that frame hanging from a scaffolding somewhere. Sands too.
I killed her all right. I killed her without pulling the trigger on a gun. I killed her by following her and getting mixed up in this damned mess.
But, he thought, I’ll be damned if I’ll burn for her!...
The sleeping city is made for a man hiding out from the law. A thousand alley cats walk the same streets on padded feet, and rats scuttle along the gutters. They are good companions to a man on the lam. Fear walks with a fugitive in the black of the night. Fear and helplessness and inevitable death. But with him also walks loneliness, and loneliness is the friend of a man who is haunted. A howling, eerie wind moaned along Fifth Avenue down into the park at Washington Square, and only a light here and there glistened in the city about him. A pall of sleep cloaked the city like a heavy down quilt. It was 4 a.m. In an hour the sun would be up. In two hours the city would be awake. In ten hours the whole town would be on his trail, howling and screaming for blood and vengeance. Murderer. Killer. Madman.
Sands pulled the collar of his coat up around his neck. He had one place to go to settle accounts with the one man who knew why he was tailing Jennie Gomez. The one man who knew, and who could have put a killer on his back-trail.
The clean, vigorous breeze whistled about him as he came into Central Park West. Hugging the buildings, he crossed several streets and finally stood across the street from the Tower Apartments. For a moment he stopped, surveying the giant edifice. It stretched high into the night sky, a pinnacle of steel and cement and humanity. Swank. High-toned. Big.
And on the twentieth floor-stretching from one end to the other-nestled the private suite of Hamlin Bell.
Behind the Tower Apartments stood an old theatre condemned, rusted, shut up forever, waiting to be torn down and converted into another metal mountain beside the Tower. Between the two buildings ran a small alleyway for pickups and deliveries.
Sands ducked into the narrow cut-in and the cold fingers of wind followed him, whipping his coat about his ankles. Easy. Too easy. The fire escape ladder touched the ground.
He was winded and panting when he crouched resting on the nineteenth floor cage. He looked above him, checking the exact location of the room he wanted on the twentieth floor. Bell’s study.
Involuntarily he sucked in his breath. Barred! The windows of the twentieth floor were barred with wrought iron bars! Sands cursed to himself, grating his teeth together, wiping the sweat off his face. Barred! That stinking dog of a tycoon!
Sands touched the gun in his pocket. Its reassuring metallic smoothness chilled his hand. He slid it out and tested the window on the fire-escape cage beside him. The room inside it was pitch black.
Slowly, easily, the window gave. Six inches. A foot. Two feet. Pausing, Sands listened carefully. There was no noise inside but the ticking of a clock. No breathing. No sound at all but the metallic beat of time.
Peering inside, Sands made out the vague outline of a fireplace at one corner of the room, a long chaise longue by the window, and a baby grand piano across from him. It was a living room. No one would be sleeping here.
Noiselessly he slid inside the room and lowered the window behind him. Slowly, so his eyes could accommodate themselves to the darkness, he made his way across the room, step by step, prayer by prayer. When he came to the end of the room he saw two doors, one leading to the right, one to the left.
Figuring that the left door led to a room facing the street outside, and the right door led to a hallway, Sands turned the right knob and opened the door. The bolt slid noisily, and he peered out into the quiet hallway. Bull’s-eye.
An instant later he had climbed the stairs to the twentieth floor and was standing in front of Hamlin Bell’s private room-the room in which Bell had interviewed him several days before. Sands had the .38 out in his hands now, and he slid forward on the carpeted floor and pressed the buzzer.
Several long minutes later slippered feet padded towards him. The door opened cautiously, and a grey man with grey eyes and grey hair and a black and grey bathrobe stood there, staring out of the darkness at Sands. Instantly the grey man’s eyes slitted and his mouth opened. His teeth were grey inside his mouth.
Sands shoved inside, the heavy .38 pressing into the man’s bathrobe. Sands closed the door quietly. “Move, boy,” whispered Sands. “Take me to Old Man Bell-and no funny business, Junior, or I’ll jet-propel you to hell and gone on a fat lead slug!”
The grey man didn’t shake at all. He wasn’t the kind to shake without being told to. He took orders. Because a gun backed up a gentleman’s orders, that had nothing to do with the fact that he was now trotting down the hallway faster than he had ever trotted before-gun to his backbone-to interrupt the irascible old man who fed him and clothed him and who had cautioned him never to break in on him in the middle of a game.
Sands grinned wryly to himself. Funny Old Man Bell didn’t have himself surrounded by gunnies. He’d had enough of them out all over the city. Bell liked good appearances. Mean a lot to a big shot.
The grey man was bending over a doorway, thrusting a clattering key in a lock. The key turned, the lock snapped, the door opened. At that moment a familiar metallic, wooden crash sounded from the room, and someone inside yelled: “Strike!” Bowling pins of course; Sands recognised the sound now.
Sands thrust his way into the room, brushing the grey man aside. Bell had just turned around and was watching Sands grimly, his big hawk nose twitching in his face. His eyes were large and his eyebrows prominent so that the grey eyes inside seemed set far back into his skull. He could hide them, flash them, or bug them out. His teeth were long and they stuck out in front. His hair was steel grey and it bristled up off his head. He was sixty-five years old but he still had a crew haircut.
“Oh, you, Sands,” snarled the leathery old condor. “Beat it, Haines,” he called to the grey man. The grey man dissolved and the door closed behind Sands. Sands moved his eyes from Bell’s face to the gun, significantly, and stepped back an inch or two.
“Bell, you damned double-crosser, you and I are going to have a heart-to-heart talk.”
Bell’s face was immobile. Then the flame of a smile burned at the corner of his face. His mouth crawled up at the ends, and his grey eyes receded ten or fifteen feet into his head. Little pinpoints of light glowed inside them. The yellow fangs of teeth popped out over the top of his greyish lip. He rubbed his nose suddenly with a long horny forefinger.
Sands glanced around at the long, low-ceilinged room. It wasn’t a room at all-it was a bowling alley, complete with an automatic racker at the end, and a pile of bowling balls in the corner. The bright light cast a burnished glow on the white pine and ash of the alleyway, and the automatic racker finished its work. There were no windows in the room at all, but an air conditioner blew in clean air in a steady, healthy flow.
Bell was grinning now, his teeth gleaming in the light like a mole’s. “Insomnia, Sands. I can’t lie in bed all night tossing and turning. I’ve got to get some kind of exercise-even at this hour of the morning. Mind if I go on?”
“Damned right I mind, Bell. You stand right there. I want to get some things straight, and then you can go back to your game.”
Bell’s eyes flashed fire briefly and then cooled down. His jaw thrust out and the smile smashed to bits. When he spoke his words came out like a whiplash. “Go on, Sands.”
“She’s dead, Bell. Jennie Gomez. You told me to get those pictures from her, but she never even had them. Bell, you hired me to get killed. You deliberately tailed me and-“
Bell’s voice cracked out like a rifle shot. “Let’s get this straight. What the devil are you talking about? You found the girl? And she is dead?”
Sands took a deep breath and held the .38 closer to his stomach to steady it. “Yeah. Dead. And my rod killed her.”
The cracked old mouth twitched into a knowing smile. “Your gun? Had a dog-fight and plugged her, didn’t you, Sands?” The voice was insinuating and slimy as a snake’s belly. “So now you want me to pull you out of hot water-just because I hired you.”
“I didn’t kill her. She was dead when I came to. I went on a Mickey Finn junket and when I came to-cold potatoes.”
Bell put his big, horned hand to his face and rubbed his jowly face around. “Maybe so. What’s this about me using you as a patsy?”
Sands backed up a moment, thinking hard. This old duck was a tough guy, used to fighting all ways. He was wise to the tricks. He was ruthless and hard and he had money to back every wish he made. Somehow he didn’t quite add up to murder. Murder would be too complicated for him to bother with.
Sands went on. “You patsied me when you sent me out on that job. A set-up. I got down there, and you sent one of your gorillas to track me-grab my rod for a plant. Lovely little monster, too, believe me. That didn’t work, and then he followed me to her place and framed me.”
Bell’s lip moved a bit and his tongue lolled about in his mouth. He scratched his neck with his fingernails and then ran his hand through his brittle grey hair. He chewed on his lip, hitched up his baggy Harris tweeds, and rubbed his upper lip with his knuckle.
“Okay, Sands, I ought to have told you sooner.” Bell slouched onto the billiard ball rack. He took out a cigar, bit off the end, shoved it in his mouth. He lit a match to it, gasped and wheezed over it until he got it blazing away, and then his piercing grey eyes looked clean through Sands.
“Jennie Gomez was blackmailing me, Sands.”
Sands moved back to the wall, his eyes hooded and his breath coming short. “Blackmailing you!”
“It all goes back to the time when Danny Gomez was still painting pictures. He joined the Spanish Revolutionists and turned spy. You knew all about that, didn’t you?”
Sands lit a cigarette, slouching down on the billiard rack opposite Bell. “Yeah. Gomez was just making a name for himself as a painter when he got tangled up in politics. Then he joined the Revolutionists, became a spy-baby, and continued working during World War II. He got killed in Italy. Now his paintings are worth a couple thousand apiece. You had ten of them, and they were stolen in 1947. That right?”
“You ever see those pictures?” Bell asked after a short pause, his eyes narrowed and his lips wrapped heavily over the cigar.
“No. Landscapes. Portraits. That right?”
“That’s right. Portraits.”
“I don’t get it. So what?”
Bell took out the stogie and surveyed it distastefully. “Believe me, I don’t care what my children do to amuse themselves. But for a girl of mine to be painted by a rabid political spy along with a well-known European political figure-that’s too much for me, Sands.” Bell paused, stared at Sands a moment. “Red. That’s your name, isn’t it, Sands?”
Sands nodded, his clown face bending up into a grin. “Yeah.”
“Okay, Red. My daughter married a man you’ve probably heard of. He’s a senator in Washington, DC. Now he’s heading an important political mission in direct opposition to the country Gomez worked for. I believe you have a good picture of the situation. I need that one picture in particular. My daughter means a lot to me, and I assure you this political mission means a lot to us all. I will stop at nothing to get it back.”
Sands had seen pictures of Bell’s daughter Lois. A madcap kid, so the story went. But now she was happily married to Senator Davison. She was the mother of two children. Bell had a decent point there.
“Why didn’t you tear up those damned pictures when you had them?”
Bell shrugged his shoulders, unwrapped the cigar with his lips, and spread his hands apart. “The seeds for our own destruction lie in all of us, Sands. If I could help myself, I would have. It is not in my blood to destroy a work of art that has genius in it. Those Gomez paintings were his best. That make sense to you?”
Sands grinned. The struggle of the flesh and the will. A man always lost the battle. “Yeah. It makes sense to me. We’re all half-nuts anyway, aren’t we?”
Bell leaned forward. “Would you mind taking that gun off my stomach, Sands? I don’t doubt it’s a very neat way to rid a man of his ulcers. Me, I’ll just suffer on happily.”
Sands lifted the .38 and scratched his cheek with the muzzle. “Listen, Mr Bell. I’m in a rat’s hole. You know what happened to me the first time I tried to turn in Gomez’s sister. She got me drummed out of the FBI.
“And now this set-up. I’m the perfect patsy. Even if you come forward with your story, that won’t help me a bit. They’d say that I killed her on orders from you-to stop her from milking you any more. Bell, just keep your mouth shut and let me handle this my own way.”
Bell stood up, clamping the cigar between his teeth. He smiled and his eyes glittered back in his skull. “That may sound dandy to you, Red. But what about me? What about those paintings? What happens to my kid when those pictures are discovered by the cops? No, Sands. You’re going to be the fall guy this time. You’re going to be the cat’s paw-for killing that girl. That’ll stop any dragged-out investigation. I’d rather pay the price to you than let that stuff pop up in the hands of the police.”
Sands stood up, and tiny prickles of fear moved up and down his neck. Chills travelled along his spine. He licked his lips with his tongue. His body was tense as a coiled spring. He suddenly realised that this had been a bad, deadly error-coming to see Old Man Bell.
“What do you mean, Bell?”
“A hundred thousand dollars, Sands,” Bell murmured, his face close to Sands, the eyes blazing like coals back in his head. “I’ll get you off easy. Ten years. That’s not anything-for a hundred thousand dollars! I’ve got influence. You can count on me. How’s that sound to you, Sands?”
In the silence Sands fought with his voice, fought fear and hate and a desperate urge to run. His voice was rasping. “I’ve seen men who’ve spent time in the bag, Bell. Not me! Not one damned day! Not for a million bucks!”
Bell moved towards Sands, slowly, menacingly, holding the cigar in his hand, gesturing with it. “Too bad you don’t agree with me, Sands,” he smiled gently, sucking on the cigar. “I’ve already decided that you will. You’re the man for the job. Tough, Sands. You can’t fight me. I’ve got everything in my favour-money and power and protection. Especially protection.”
Bell paused to let that word sink in.
Sands raised the .38. His breath steadied and his nerves were suddenly toned up and fit. He aimed the gun.
Then instinctively he whirled. There was someone behind him. Someone wearing a funny, spicy perfume. Coming up in back of him. He had heard no one, he had felt no one in the place, but suddenly he smelled that funny, spicy perfume.
But just as he turned, aghast, and his .38 spun around with him, he felt the blazing whir of steel wings in the air above his head, smelled the salty tart odour of fear through him, tasted the gritty slime of blood, and he spun downwards to the floor, dropping thousands of miles in a glorious flood of exploding planets and stars and galaxies.

III - Model for Murder

She was slim and neat as TNT, this one was. Her eyes were brown pools of arsenic and old French wine. She wore her blonde hair feathery and fluffy, and a thin line of dark brown tufts showed in the part. Perched on the back of her head at a jaunty angle was a go-to-hell French beret.
But she was no phoney, Sands could see at a glance. She had a pallet on her lap, a brush in her right hand, and a loaded .22 Colt Woodsman in her left. She had the paint-smeared brush aimed at the canvas on the easel, the Colt aimed at Sands’s guts. The safety was off, and the lady’s dainty little hands were itchy with artistic inspiration.
“Hold damned still,” she said to Sands. “I want this to look just like you. I’d hate for them to get the wrong man.”
Sands opened his mouth to growl at her, but the pain stabbed through him like quick lime. He groaned and leaned wearily back. His hands were shackled to the chair back and his feet were tied to the legs.
Slowly his vision cleared and he turned his aching eyes to the canvas. The sweat that had been waiting inside him beaded out on his forehead. She was the one, this lovely, rose-lipped gal. The canvas portrait she was using to paint his own face over was the smiling, dark-eyed likeness of Jennie Gomez.
Dead Jennie Gomez.
Painfully Sands moved in the chair, but the shackles bit into his wrists. He groaned suddenly and eased himself back into the chair again. The wide expense of light from the side of the room came through a big window slanted up to the sun. It was similar to the window in the studio of Jennie Gomez.
But this studio was not the one Jennie Gomez had lived in. This one was bigger, and none of Jennie Gomez’s pictures were piled in the corner. No. There was only one Gomez picture in the room. That was the painting on the easel. The painting that was being done over with his own face.
The girl turned again, and her taffy-tinted hair glinted in the sudden sunlight. Her brown eyes sparkled viciously at him, and he could see her little fist tighten around the .22 in her left hand.
“Steady, boy,” she purred, and her voice would have matched that of any cougar with active ulcers. “Hold real still.”
“How can I look my prettiest when I’m chained in, kid?” Sands asked, grinning.
“I’m no damned kid, boy. Call me Taffy. That’s my name. Get it, Red? Taffy.”
“Taffy with strychnine,” shrugged Sands. “What the hell. They’ll do anything these days to trap an honest gee.”
“To trap rats!” snapped the girl, her bright eyes flashing and her crimson lips thrust out belligerently. “Now hold still! Damn it, I’ll club your face in!”
“Temper, temper,” grinned Red Sands, biting down the pain in him at the quick movement of the bracelets about his hands. “What’s your racket, kid? You work for Old Hawk Nose himself? Old Money Bags?”
The girl bristled and golden sparks shot from her eyes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Now hold still.”
“You’re a lousy little painter, or you’d have that thing finished already. I’ve been chained here for a couple hours.”
“You shut up and don’t bother me.”
She clamped her lips together and grimly went on slashing strokes of oil down the canvas. The picture was coming along neatly, slickly, evenly. It was a professional job, well done, realistic, but not powerful. A good commercial job.
It looked just like Red Sands. It showed a clown’s face, with the querulous quirks at the corners of the mouth, the amused sea-green eyes, the ocean of freckles smeared over the pale thin face.
“Where’d you get the portrait of the girl?” Sands asked after a moment of painful silence. The damned bracelets were tight and they wouldn’t budge. No amount of slipping or sliding would shuck them off.
The girl turned her fiery little face to him, and her brown eyes were hot with excitement, and her taffy hair shot out electric voltage. Her little chin came up and her tongue lashed out at him. “It’s none of your damned business, mister. I got it. I’m using it. It wasn’t yours. And who the hell cares?”
Sands grinned. “Me. Listen, kid, give me a break. What happened to me? How did I get here? I wake up and I’m shackled to a chair. Last thing I knew I was talking to a friend of mine.” His own eyes narrowed, and his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. No use telling too much. No telling how much this chick knew. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.
She smiled brightly. “I got you. You were sent here, COD. I paid the man the two-bits and he gave me you. I was told to paint you. I was given the canvas to use. And that’s all there is to know. Now shut up and hold still.”
“Look, kid. What’s the score? Why are you using that portrait to paint over? Can’t you buy canvas any more? What’s the gimmick? I don’t get it at all.”
She dashed some more lines onto the canvas and turned to him brightly. “You’ll find out pretty soon.”
Sands chewed on his teeth a few minutes and then he lapsed into moody silence. What the hell else could he do?
Taffy held up the portrait in front of her and smiled at it happily. She thrust it off from her and moved around to get it into the best light. She moved it to her and looked it over carefully from one end to the other.
“It’s finished,” she said.
Sands groaned. “So am I. Get me out of this chair, kid.”
Taffy frowned and walked over to him. She leaned over. “Taffy,” she said solemnly, “not kid.”
“Taffy,” snapped Sands. “Okay, Taffy. Undo me.”
Taffy laughed. She said, “I’ve got the gun, Sands. Yours and mine too. Now don’t try to get away when I do untie you. Don’t try to play any funny tricks, either, or I’ll smash in your freckled face. Got that?”
Sands stared at the tough little chick in front of him from the flaming top of her taffy head to the bottom of her miniature clod-hoppers of bright red leather, and he found himself grinning. “Okay, kitten.”
She pulled out a long exaggerated chain from her pocket and a bunch of keys dangled from the end. She looked like a jailer in an Old Western jail house. She selected one small key and inserted it in the manacles. She snapped it to the right, then the left, and the iron hoops loosened on Sands’s wrists.
Sands stood up, rubbing his wrists gingerly. They were red and sore and bruised. She slit the ropes about his ankles with a knife.
“Oh,” she said with a start, staring at his wrists. “They look terrible!” And she whipped out of the room and returned with some burn ointment. Sands let her rub it into the skin, and as she worked over him like a little beaver he found himself watching her with interest.
“Now don’t bang them against anything,” she told him when she had finished. “Keep your wrists in your pockets, and don’t get them all mussed up.”
“Okay,” he said. “What else, boss? What about the picture?”
“You leave that to me,” said the little doll with the taffy hair and the red leather shoes. “I’m hanging you in a minute.”
Sands said, “Well, that’s about the only thing that hasn’t happened to me today. What time is it? I’m hungry.”
“It’s about eleven,” she said. “Time for breakfast. I’ll bring some food back with me.”
“Back with you! You going somewhere?”
Taffy grinned, and her mouth, when it smiled, lit up her whole face. “Sure. I’m going out into Washington Square and hang you.”
“In effigy?”
“No. In exhibition.”
“What about me? The real me. The flesh and blood and hungry me?”
“You’ll stay here,” she said calmly.
“Oh? Will I? You don’t know me, Taffy. I’m hell on wheels. Just naturally contrary. I don’t think I will stay.”
She smiled a smug little smile, and the dimples danced around in her cheeks. “No?”
She pulled a newspaper out from under a cushion on the chair. “Look,” she said happily, handing it to him.
Licking his upper lip thoughtfully, he unfolded the newspaper. Yeah. He knew what it said. He knew what the trick was. Old Man Bell had baited the trap. With him. How long before the cops began to pour out with their blue uniforms on and their guns in their holsters?
ROBERT SANDS SOUGHT
That was the headline, three banks.
EX-FBI AGENT HUNTED IN MURDER OF WOMAN HE TURNED JUDAS FOR
That was great. There was no picture, though.
“Don’t worry about the picture,” the girl said. “There are a hundred cops around here who know you on sight.”
“Yeah,” said Sands slowly. “All right. Agreed. But what about that painting of me, kid? What’re you going to do with that?”
She picked up the picture and steadied her beret on her head. A wisp of hair fell over her eye and she brushed it back and tucked it under the cap. Her face was as bright as the noon sun when she turned to him. “I’m going to exhibit it on the Square.”
“But why? I don’t get it. All this mess just to paint a picture!” Sands shook his head.
“No, Red. Listen. Whoever did kill Jennie Gomez knows you were with her. Right? He’ll be anxious to put the cops on your tail as soon as possible, right? So you can’t do him any harm by tracking him down while you’re at large. Right?”
“Right.” The blonde kid had him there.
“This is bait. The first strange man who asks about this painting will probably be the man we’re after-especially if he asks where you are and what you’re doing. Everything is centred in this neighbourhood.”
“You a cop, kitten?”
She turned towards the door with the canvas under her arm. “You know these Washington Square art exhibits, don’t you?”
Sands grinned. “Sure. A bunch of paintings go out every day for sale on the streets. Good publicity gag for the Village. Some suckers actually buy the damned things.”
“That’s right, Sands. You’re going on exhibit today in public. We’ll smoke him out, you and I.”
“You a cop, or a federal agent, kitten? I don’t quite trust the feds these day. Being as I have a kind of personal difference with them.”
She smiled at him as she opened the door. “Oh, I do a lot of things. Call me a trouble shooter. Whenever there’s a shooting I come around and cause trouble.”
She slammed the door and Sands had to grin.
From the window he watched her walk along Washington Square South-that street of many names-until she came to the first of the picture groups leaning against the wall. Others were already hanging from grillwork fences and from window ledges.
He saw the flash of her red beret as she set the big canvas down and leaned it casually against the cement wall as if it were just another hunk of art on exhibit. She joined a small group and he could see her red beret bobbing as she talked.
He sighted along the street to the left and to the right, sizing up the buildings. There were three or four studio buildings, and their high windows glinted with the morning sunlight. A brownstone building, a grey building, a white building. Two white buildings.
The second white building-he recognised that one clearly. It was the studio building where Jennie Gomez had lived. It was only two blocks away. Right now the cops were turning that place upside down, searching for anything and everything.
They wouldn’t find the pictures. Sands had searched the studio high and low before he’d left it. Between the instant Jennie Gomez had seen him and the moment she had died, she’d taken the pictures out of there and hidden them. Hidden them or shipped them on to another party-someone else who could keep the blackmail ball rolling.
This blonde chick with the taffy hair-was she the blackmail heiress?
Sands opened the closet door to the studio room and searched through the piles of canvases there. There were stacks of oils with the taffy touch, but there wasn’t a Gomez in a carload. He closed the closet and stood in the middle of the room.
He moved into the bedroom after a moment of thought, but there were no canvases there either. Prowling through the dresser drawer he came across nothing but a pencilled notation on a slip of paper. It was a series of items jotted down like a grocery list.
1.	Man in a cornfield.
2.	Woman in front of church.
3.	Peasants in fields.
4.	Golden landscape-wheat.
5.	Funeral procession through small village.
6.	Woman in vineyards.
7.	A wedding, interior church.
8.	Woman asleep over wine bottle.
9.	Children fishing in river. 
10. Girl and politician.
Sands’s breath came faster. Ten items. Ten notations. That made plenty of sense. The little taffy twist had a curiosity the size of nine black cats.
Scrambling through the girl’s papers he found a blue-lined note book. Page one was ripped out. Page two had a pencil sketch. Page three, a flower arrangement. Page four, a list of nine items.
1.	Girl. Jane with black hat.
2.	Man with red bow tie. Mr Stanley.
3.	Man with grey felt hat.
4. Mary Roberts with boyish bob.
5.	Basket of fruit.
6.	Three little girls in pink.
7.	Washington Square.
8.	Night over Manhattan.
9.	Sally,Hanson. 
10.
Number ten was blank. The figure ten was there, but nothing came after it.
Of course! Only a fool would have failed to spot the trick. The original Gomez paintings were underneath all those portraits Jennie Gomez had done. Underneath on the same canvases-held there with a fixative and a coating of varnish-and then painted over with the bold, less skilful portraits of Jennie Gomez. The paintings were still piled up in the studio.
List number one was a list of the original Gomez scenes. List number two contained the corresponding camouflage Jennie Gomez portraits covering the originals.
Sands cursed softly. Who was the taffy queen? How did she fit into this? Why was she looking for the picture? Had she killed Jennie Gomez for her famous brother’s paintings?
Walking over to the hall door, Sands opened it. He stared at the panelling on the door. There was an engraved card pinned there-the name of the occupant. It read LUCILLE BELL.
Bell! Lucille Bell-Lois Bell’s little sister! Hamlin Bell’s second daughter! Taffy!
Sands slammed the door shut and slipped over to the window and looked down again into the sunlit street at the green, lovely park. The crowd had broken up a bit around the first group of paintings and there were only four people left there.
Taffy, two girls and a man. Sands could see Taffy’s red beret bobbing in the sunlight, and he could picture the animation and wild, animal excitement in her face as she talked. A live kid, that one. A neat little trick indeed. And Hamlin Bell’s daughter. Taffy.
No wonder she wanted to smoke out the murderer. The murderer had the tenth picture. Her sister was in it.
There was an ear-splitting jangle, and Sands spun around. The phone by the easel was ringing. Sands bit his lip. Thoughtfully he walked over to it and lifted the receiver. With an instinct handed down through years and years of inherited caution, he muted his voice and said hoarsely:
“Yeah?”
A tight, electrically charged voice on the other end of the wire said, “Callahan? You there already?”
Sands chewed his lip. He nodded suddenly. “Yeah.” Something prompted him to add: “Chief.”
“I’m damned glad. She’s all right, isn’t she? You get her home here quick. And take care of Sands.”
Sands held the receiver off from him. The chill icy water churned inside him. He remembered that voice. That confident, authoritative voice. That nervous, high-tensioned, demanding voice.
The voice of Hamlin Bell. A twenty million dollar voice. With tax refund.
“I never should have let her talk me into that fool trick,” Bell was grating on. “Good work, Callahan. Bring them both in to me, personally. My way will be best. Sands can pay the piper.”
“Sure, chief,” Sands croaked.
“Why should I care who murdered that girl? I want the police off those pictures!” Bell grumbled on, a man convincing himself that it was purely an accident he was a twelve-carat rat.
“Sure, chief,” Sands muttered and hung up the receiver.
He ran to the window and looked down into the Square. The group about Taffy Bell was breaking up. Taffy waited for a moment, undecided, and then walked over to the painting, standing there looking at it.
At that instant a car drove up to the kerb beside her, and she turned around as if someone from the car had called her. Sands could not make out the expression on her face, but he saw her tense there, frozen for a long moment.
She looked quickly from left to right, saw no one, and then Sands made out the sudden sag of her shoulders. She hesitated, took a deep breath, and backed towards the picture, looking quickly up and down the street in one last desperate try.
Quickly a man got out of the car. He jumped onto the sidewalk, grabbed her wrist, and pulled her towards the car. He was holding something next to her ribs, in close. She did not protest at all. She got into the car ahead of him. The car dug out and sped down the street.
Sands could not make out the licence plate number. As he stood there, fingering his chin, whistling softly to himself, trying desperately to get his mind functioning, his eye caught another swift movement in the street. Two men stood together on the corner, not far from where his painting was leaning against the wall of the building.
One of the men nodded upwards, and the sun caught his eye at the instant he glanced up square at the window in which Sands was standing. The man with him nodded, stretched his legs for the street, crossing it and moving over towards Lucille Bell’s apartment. The second man followed, after a sharp glance up and down the street. He had to get the hell out of there fast.
He ran for the door, snapped it open. And even as he did so he could hear the slow, methodical tramp of feet clumping up the five-storey walk-up.

IV - The Hunt

The noon sun shone bright and gay on the world of Washington Square. It was spring and the earth basked in the clean air like a happy bride. Bright colours and flamboyant dresses glowed in the sunshine. Groups of passers-by stood in front of the oil paintings on exhibit and an air of peace and contentment and good cheer hung over the world.
In the same brilliant sunlight Red Sands toiled with a sliding window high on the top floor of the studio building. His face was covered with perspiration and it was twisted in rage and fury at the sticking, balking window.
Then suddenly the window gave and slid upwards. Furtively Sands climbed out onto the fire escape and crouched there a moment, panting. He felt inside his coat pocket and nodded briefly. With an air of intent listening, he craned towards the inside of the room. Apparently hearing just what he wanted to, he leaped carefully along the fire escape ladder. Only instead of climbing down it towards the street he climbed up.
He climbed hand over hand and made the roof in a few moments. From the roof he paused a moment, leaning down, looking at the window he had just left. Then he disappeared and darted across the roof of the building. He felt inside his coat again as he moved swiftly across the roof.
A moment later two heads peered out the open window next to the fire escape. The two heads-one fat and bullish and red as a slab of raw beef, the other narrow and pinched and wearing thick glasses-turned to each other and bobbed up and down in conversation. The man with the big face and the big body to match clambered laboriously out onto the fire escape platform and began climbing too.
The big man climbed downwards. He climbed painfully from one step to the next, every step he took a torture. His feet were tired and his face was puffed and red with exertion. He climbed down from floor to floor in his fruitless quest.
The thin face with the thick glasses watched a moment and then disappeared inside the room. And then there was no more motion for the interested sun to watch. Greenwich Village settled back into the same gay, listless, lazy existence as before. Nothing ever happened there. It was an island set off from the rest of the world-an island devoted to art and beauty and culture.
Sands had found his .38 lying on the kitchen table. Quite possibly Taffy Bell had meant for him to find it there after she had gone. Now he patted it gently where it rested inside his jacket pocket. He crouched for an instant by the door opening on the roof, and then he soundlessly opened the door. The brilliant light cut down into the stair well, painting his shadow big and black along the casement.
Sands descended cautiously. One man climbing down the fire escape. The other searching an apartment, suspicious of the obviously open window and the fluttering drapes. And Sands, the fugitive, laughing to himself, creeping down the stairs inside, floor by floor, quietly making the street without any interruption.
As Sands disappeared swiftly down the glaring bright street where anything could be seen and nothing was, he saw out of the tail of his eye the big man with the florid face moving sheepishly around front from in back of the apartment...
It was cool and dark and restful in the Thackeray Room and he felt safe again. It was like old home week. He sat up on the big stool and hooked his heel over the brass rail familiarly. The amber-eyed, barrel-chested man sauntered over, his eyes watching Sands closely.
“You’re starting in early today,” commented the bar-keep, his eyes veiled and impersonal.
“Yeah,” said Sands. “How about a cheese sandwich to glue down my rye and water, pal?”
“Why not?” said the barkeep, picking up a glass and wiping it. “Cheese on white,” he said over his shoulder into the dark, secret innards of the bar. “You want that rye straight, don’t you, pal? Seems I remember it that way.”
“Seems your memory is functioning one hundred proof,” Sands said. “Water on the side.”
“Sure,” said the barkeep, and he got the rye and water. Sands had the uneasy impression that the amber-eyed man was watching him narrowly as he worked.
“I see the oil painting of the girl is gone,” Sands said offhandedly. “Sell it?”
“Yeah. Blonde kid came and bought it. She paints herself. Liked the style-said something about savages and primitive urges, or something. Me, I don’t mess around none with that art and beauty stuff, but I kind of went for the style of the particular dame in the painting. Dark. Fresh. You know. Nice snazzy gal.”
“Yeah,” said Sands, lifting the rye to the heavens. “Well, here’s to dames-snazzy and otherwise.” He tossed it down.
“Too bad that kind has to die so hard, ain’t it, pal?”
The amber-eyed man’s face was too close to Sands. It was insolent and the grin was twisted, and the cow-catcher chin was jutting into Sands’s face. Sands moved back.
“I don’t get you, pal.” He touched the gun in his jacket pocket absently as he spoke.
“Dame in the picture was bumped off last night. Funny, ain’t it, that you was popping questions about her just before she got bumped?”
Sands set the rye shot glass down with a hard slam. “Bud, if you’re trying to say something, come on out right now and say it. Otherwise, brood to yourself. It keeps the air quieter and the atmosphere cleaner.”
But the amber-eyed man leaned forward further, and his bulging muscular body poised on the mahogany bar as if he were ready to fling himself over it at Sands’s throat.
“I ain’t suggesting and I ain’t insinuating. I’m saying it right out loud, pal. You shouldn’t of come back here. I’m no friend and I ain’t no enemy. They’re on your tail, pal. They’ve been coming in here. The cops.”
Sands leaned back, his face white. “Who?”
“Dame came in here this morning and flashed a badge on me.”
“What kind of badge?”
The barkeep frowned, his big thick eyebrows moving down over his face like a screen. “What do you mean? There’s different kinds?”
Sands rubbed his upper lip. “Forget it. Then what?”
“It’s the dame bought the picture. Said she seen the picture from outside in the street, and would I sell it. I said, that’s my racket, and I wrapped it up and gave it to her.”
Sands stared at the big man. “Why you telling me this, pal?”
The barkeep rubbed his nose enthusiastically. “There’s a bit more pal, and for a bit more interest on your part-that special kind of a green-type salad interest-I might be willing to unburden my festering soul.”
Sands pulled out a ten-dollar bill. “Yeah,” Sands said. “Try this on your subconscious. I never did think you guys made a living selling that rotten liquor. I figured you had angles.”
“Angles all over the place,” the unpleasant man smiled. “The babe with the blonde hair says don’t say a word to anybody. Naturally I figure that’s okay for her to say, but I figure, it ain’t okay for me to pay attention to that kind of talk. Especially when it ain’t bought and paid for.”
Sands leaned against the bar. “Anything else?”
“I took her address. For a slight financial inducement I might-“
“She gave you her address?”
The barkeep’s eyes slitted over. “Sure.”
Sands bit his lip. An easy trap. A come-on. A come-on and get killed. Look out, Sands. “Why?”
The barkeep suddenly grinned. “Oh, sure. I forgot to tell you. I ain’t suckering you into a gun-trap, pal. Why back there when she gave me the picture in the first place, the dead babe told me to be sure and take down the address of whoever bought that painting. I asked the blonde dame and got her address.”
Sands stepped back an inch or two. He tried to cover over the surprise and immediate excitement surging up in him. “Yeah? Why. Did she say why?”
The barkeep stared at the ceiling, scratching his ear. “Something about-oh, yeah. She said, ‘It’s the one that counts.’ Or something like that. That make any sense to you, pal?” The barkeep leaned forward again, the smell of spilled beer and stale liquor and dead gin wafting up into Sands’s nose.
Sands tried to keep the elated grin off his mask of a face. His eyes sparkled sea-green and bright and his lips twisted up suddenly.
“It could be,” he grinned. “It could be, surer’n hell! Thanks a lot, pal!”
Sands whipped out a ten dollar bill and tossed it at the barkeep. The barkeep’s amber eyes glinted gold and he leaned over to pick up the bill. He nodded to himself as he pocketed it.
“I can pick the gold ones,” he muttered. “I can pick the suckers.”
Sands had disappeared out the front door. Three minutes later he stood in front of the exhibit, staring at the spot where the picture of him had been leaning against the wall. There was nothing now there at all.
It was the important picture Hamlin Bell had mentioned, all right. The blackmail canvas. The other nine paintings stolen from Bell’s collection had been taken to cover up the importance of the one big main one. Trust Jennie Gomez to play it smart and hide the big one in plain sight where it would never be discovered.
From all Sands could figure, Taffy Bell had discovered about the painting somehow-possibly from a talk with the barkeep-and she had immediately taken it with her. Realising she would have to cover it up and change it or let it fall into the hands of someone in the know with Jennie Gomez, she had altered it into the portrait of Sands.
Killing two birds with one stone, so to speak. Also, Taffy Bell knew that the canvas would attract little attention sitting in the middle of an art exhibit. No one but the real murderer of Jennie Gomez would notice it. And as soon as he saw it he would ask questions, and those questions would trap him.
But no one had asked any questions. And while Taffy Bell was gone with her father’s private dicks, someone who liked portraits had picked up the picture and carted it home.
Who?
Trying to keep himself as inconspicuous as possible, Sands questioned the tall girl whose paintings hung next to Taffy’s. The girl’s eyes widened.
“You’re the man in Taffy’s picture!” she gasped, startled.
“Where did the picture go? Somebody buy it?”
“Yes. An old man with a scar on his face.”
“An old man?” Sands bit his lip. An old duck who liked paintings. Millions of them around the Village.
“Did he give you any address?”
“Oh, no. I didn’t ask him for any. But everybody around here knows him. He lives right down this street. His name’s Henry. Mr Henry.”
Sands nodded and smiled. “Thanks, kid.”
The blonde girl watched Sands curiously as he walked down the street. Then she shrugged and went back to work, readjusting her neatly lined-up pictures.
Mr Henry lived at Number 7, about two blocks down the street. He lived in the cellar, and there was only one entrance to the place, Sands learned from a woman in a shop. It sounded like the entrance to a dog house from the description. Sands hid the grin and thanked the old, withered-up delicatessen woman. She wagged her hooked nose at him and smiled a toothless grin.
Sands moved on down the street, and the garbage piled higher in the gutters and the cats grew tougher and scrawnier, and the kids grew greasier and dirtier. The only thing that didn’t change was the stink of garlic, and that had been with him all the way.
Turning into a twisting, corkscrew lane, Sands paused a second to light a cigarette. It was Last-Mile Lane. The sign was twisted and battered in the sun light. Number 7 was at the end of the lane, and Sands studied the place carefully through half-lidded eyes. Sweat stood under his lids. There were cans of garbage strewn about the twisting lane, and boxes of trash, and a soulful dog sat in a window above a pot of geraniums, eyeing him dismally. The ramshackle place had the look of a hunted, bullet-torn, dying man.
The door was green and it was painted crudely and badly. There was no knocker and there was no bell. No breath of air stirred in the stinking, filthy lane, and Sands rapped on the wood with his bare knuckles. No sign of a face in any of the windows towering above him showed at all. It was as if he was knocking at the last door this side of hell.
Then the door opened. There was no one inside that he could see. Only blackness and a musty, dismal smell of blackness and despair. A voice inside the room said:
“Come in.”
It was a pleasant voice. Somehow Sands felt the voice was assumed, painted over like a new outer coat. That the original voice was a snarl, a growl, a leer, a twisted, hating voice.
He came into the blackened room gripping his gun by the butt. There was a quick movement and the door slammed behind him. A brilliant, glaring bulb flashed on in a corner behind him with a sudden blinding explosion. The bare walls and the crude stone masonry and the sweating, hideous sewer pipes glistened in the illumination.
From behind him came the deadly purr of a voice.
“We were expecting you, Sands.”
Sands turned around. And what he saw made him lose the gun from his icy grasp, made his jaw drop open, made his eyes glaze over in sudden, complete terror. The sweat tore at his skin and the hair on his head writhed.
“You!” he gasped.
The man sitting in the chair with the rifle cradled in his lap was a grotesque, grimly drawn caricature of a human being. He was an old, twisted, torn-up man and his face was a long seared scar from temple to neck. The dark, smouldering eyes were fine and deep and tempered, and the mouth was a vicious twist of brute strength and violence.
The man was smiling grimly now at Sands, and the only smile he could manage was a grim, horrible imitation of a normal one. His face was a pathetic misrepresentation of a human visage.
Red Sands took in a deep, shuddering breath and tried to steady himself against the back of the door. Once again his hot, torn eyes darted about from corner to corner, seeking a window, a door, a crevice.
There was nothing. The rifle was a sniper’s gun, and the man in the chair held it like an expert rifleman. It would be hard to tell where that man’s expertness stopped. Expert in rifles. Expert in killing. Expert in such a strangely opposite talent as creative art.
The man in the chair was Danny Gomez. Danny Gomez, free of the grey powder he wore in his hair when he walked the Village streets as an old man. Free of the crumpled tramp’s clothes he wore when he poked about in ash cans along West Broadway. Free of all those disguises that kept people informed he was a vagabond, a stumble-bum, a creep from way down under.
“Sit down, Sands,” said Gomez with a wolfish snarl.
Gomez chuckled, and the laughter sent chills racing up and down Sands’s spine. “Yeah, I’m Gomez all right. You knew that, didn’t you? We know each other-from that fight in the street last night.”
But now Sands’s eyes were riveted with a strange and horrible fascination at Gomez’s hands, the hands that lay carelessly on top the sniper’s rifle in his lap. And the final link in the bizarre, unbelievable picture fell into place.
Sands gasped, and his eyes were glittering with horror.
Ruefully Gomez stared down at his hands. “Yeah,” he said finally. “You’ve got it now, Sands. Now you see. Now you know the whole rotten story-the whole filthy joke that Fate played on me-the whole ghastly comedy of my life. Now you see it all in front of you.”
Sands sat down heavily in a wooden chair, and he could not move. The two hands of Danny Gomez-the two talented, inspired hands that had painted some of the greatest paintings of the twentieth century-now lay there caressing the rifle barrel. They lay there still and lifeless-charred and twisted remains of what had once been a pair of obedient human hands, but which were now burned, scorched, scarred beyond recognition by the same fire and smoke that had twisted Gomez’s face into that terrible, revolting mask.
“Don’t worry, Sands,” grinned Gomez, “these mitts can still shoot. Yeah that’s the story. No doctor would dare do anything for them. Couldn’t afford to-not work on the hands of Gomez? They were scared over there in those dead and dying countries. They were afraid the wrath of heaven would descend upon them if they failed to make me whole again, if they managed to ruin the hands of the Great Gomez. And so these twisted, scarred talons are no good to me at all now, for painting. No good to me at all, and they can never be saved! It’s too late!”
The sweat was oozing out onto Sands’s face and body at the violent savagery of Gomez’s words. “But Gomez,” he whispered, “in the United States there are surgeons-“
Gomez leaned back in the chair and his sardonic, burning eyes flared brilliantly. “You think these doctors here would risk an operation on Gomez-Gomez the revolutionist? Gomez the spy? The agent? No, my friend. You see, it is all a mockery. A jest! Life itself, indeed-as, my friend, you of all people, well know.”
From ear to ear the mottled face split into a wry, rare grin.
Sands drew himself up tightly. “You’ve got the pictures, Gomez? It was you who took the pictures from your sister’s apartment?”
Gomez nodded his head. “Yes,” he said simply. “I took them away. They were painted underneath her miserable imitations! That sister of mine could never paint!” He spat violently on the floor, rubbing his face with the back of his wrist.
Sands straightened in the chair. “You’ve got them here, Gomez. I want the pictures. You and I both know the value of silence between us. If we could make a deal for those pictures-“
Gomez’s face writhed in a crimson fury. “A deal! A deal to deliver up those paintings to you? For Hamlin Bell? No, my dear Sands, no!” Gomez was shaking with fury now, and his eyes burned and his eyebrows bristled. He leaned forward and the penetrating intensity of his words drove them out into the air like miniature explosions.
He leaned back suddenly. The silence fell about them. “Besides,” he said quietly, with a leer, “they are finished now. They are gone.” He smiled slowly and bitterly.
The strange bizarre terror crept along Sands’s backbone again. “Gone,” he repeated dully. “I don’t see what you mean. You-you destroyed the canvases? You burned them up? The best of the paintings you made?” Sands was half out of his chair, the excitement in his voice carrying him forward.
Gomez hurled himself out of the chair towards the crude fireplace at the end of the room. The rifle glinted as he twirled it about with his blackened, twisted claws. “Look for yourself!” Gomez cried, springing by the fireplace, thrusting one charred hand towards the ashes in the hearth. “There lie your nine lovely paintings! The nine greatest paintings of the twentieth century!”
Gomez’s voice wavered up into a half-mad laugh, and he strode back to the chair again, gripping the rifle, his eyes lidded and dark. His long slender body relaxed in the chair, slumping into a defeated, weary helplessness.
He laughed softly then, and the sounds that came from his throat were sudden music. Gentle, flowing sounds. Thoughtful, lovely laughter.
“You may be able to understand,” he said. “I cannot let these things live when I cannot do better. An artist must always outdo himself with each performance. Without that dominating desire, that driving urge deep inside him, he is a sad and worthless artisan indeed. Sands, you must try to understand me! That is a fundamental truth in all great art. To surpass! To exceed! To grasp the stars, the sun, the galaxies in the very ends of the heavens!”
Sands stared at Gomez with no breath stirring in his body. The man’s voice was swelling and expanding and filling the room, overflowing it, and the dynamic tension inside him was poised at the highest possible pitch.
“No, Sands,” Gomez said softly. “I cannot let those pieces of art exist any longer. They must all go. I can never paint again. I was not my best when I stopped. Therefore, the world must never be allowed to laugh at my feeble, pitiful practice attempts.”
His eyes stared moodily at the floor. His body loosened in the chair, and he slumped from his head to his feet. His head shook sadly. Age crept over him as he sat there. He was suddenly a hundred years old, the electric vitality gone.
He was a hulk of a man, the juice sapped from him. He was helpless, shaking, palsied. His eyes glowed dully, and his lips trembled as he smiled at Sands.
“Get out of here.”
Sands rose, crossed the room and stood before Gomez. The burns had unsprung some precariously balanced artistic tension in him. The kind of man he now was could certainly be capable of killing.
Then it all came clear.
“You killed her, didn’t you, Gomez?” Sands spoke the words softly and quietly, but their force was double for all the gentleness. Gomez lowered his head into his palm and shook it slowly. “You wanted those pictures from her and you tried to get them, but she wouldn’t give them to you. And you killed her to get them. Right?”
Gomez clawed lightly at the rifle. “Yes,” he said simply. “She was always trying to run my business! That sister of mine! That talentless, crazy, slave-driving sister of mine! I killed her! Yes! She was using my picture to blackmail a dirty old man with a spiritless, sad excuse for a daughter! Not with my pictures, Sands! Not with my paintings! Not with the priceless relics of the Great Gomez!”
Sands moved to the centre of the room again.
“Your number’s up, Gomez. You’ve got to come with me. You killed her with my gun and planted it on her, and it’s you or me. Come on. I’m loaded, Gomez. I wouldn’t try any funny business. It’s broad daylight outside.”
Gomez smiled and the puffy face twisted sideways in mirth. “Maybe it is time to throw in the towel, eh? Maybe I’ve had my day. Maybe the last corner is turned.”
Gomez’s eyes glinted cunningly. Sands stared at him closely, and lifted the .38 out of his jacket pocket. “Move, Gomez,” he said softly. “Drop that rifle and move on out that door.”
Out of the corner of his eyes Sands could see the portrait of himself staring out from the wall. He would come back later and get it. Now that the murderer of Jennie Gomez was under lock and key, the picture would be safe from the cops. Sands would come down later and pick it up.
Gomez was fast. He was faster than a bobcat with a hot foot. He spun and the rifle smashed out against Sands’s chest and exploded a split second later. If it had exploded at the moment it touched his chest Sands would have been splattered over the inside of that dirty cellar like orange marmalade. But instead the flame burnt along him and the lead tore through his shoulder. Immediately hot blood surged out into his shirt.
Gomez lifted the rifle again to fire, a wild, raw hate in his black eyes. He fired and the slug missed. Sands pulled himself down into a crouch in the corner and thumbed two slugs at Gomez. One hit him in the ribs and another smashed into his leg.
The room was full of cordite and gunsmoke clouds. Gomez swept the rifle above him in a wide, murderous arc and the electric light smashed to smithereens with a splintering crash. Somebody scuttled along the darkened floor and grabbed up the painting. Then a wide slit of daylight streamed in and immediately the door slammed shut.
Weakly Sands got to his feet, swaying dizzily. Blood sopped his shoulders and chest. He pulled himself across the room, breathing in deeply, cursing to himself. That damned fool Gomez. He could never get away in broad daylight.
Sands forced the door open and blinked into the bright daylight. Lead powdered the green door by his face. The damned fool was still shooting in the alleyway. Sands sent a slug after him, but the lead pellet glanced along the side of a building and the ricochet sang into the clean bright air.
Madly Gomez staggered down the street, heading for Washington Square. The painting was under his arm, and there was no telling where he was going.
Sands stumbled along after him, every step a separate wrench on a torture rack. He levelled the Colt again and fired. The lead smashed dead on into an iron railing.
Gomez whirled about, poised the sniper’s rifle and fired. Lead whistled by Sands’s stomach. Gomez was aiming low. Sands ducked beside a building and fired again.
Women and kids were racing for cover in the street. At the end of the street by Washington Square, Sands made out the sudden blue of a policeman’s uniform. Gomez was a dozen yards from the cop and he saw him too. Gomez, panicky, raised the rifle and fired at the policeman. The cop went down with a slug in his leg.
Gomez turned, looking about wildly. An iron-spiked fence ran along the sidewalk beside him. Past the fence lay a garden, and past the garden tenement houses. If he could get through those tenement houses he could find shelter. Already a crowd was gathering at the corner, like a huge and angry wolf pack.
Gomez scaled the iron fence expertly. One leg over, he was poised to jump down, when the cop raised himself painfully and fired. Gomez hung there, leaning into the thrust of the slug. At the same instant Sands fired and the other slug caught Gomez in the thigh. Gomez grimaced, gave a howling, maddened shout into the air, slammed the painting down onto the heavy, tough iron spike, and then, summoning up the last of his strength, he dashed himself down headfirst onto the spikes, catching his neck expertly.
Sands turned away, sick, and the crowd gave a strangled gasp...
“Rye and water,” sighed Sands, and the amber-eyed bar-keep grinned.
“You’re getting to be a steady customer here, pal. Know it?”
Sands grinned at the barkeep and turned to the lady at his side. “What’s for you, Taffy?”
Taffy smiled, looking at the barkeep. “Rye and water,” she said. “What’s good enough for this character with me is good enough for me.”
Amber Eyes winked at Sands. “What you’ve got there mister, I’d keep if I had it myself.”
Sands chucked Taffy under the chin. “I’ll sure think about it.”
“How’s the shoulder?” Taffy asked after the first round.
“Good. Your dad get that picture all right? That was the one he wanted. I haven’t had the guts to go to see him yet.”
“You’re coming with me. He wants to give you some kind of a bonus, he says. Thinks you’re terrific. Silly man.”
Sands leaned back, puzzled. “Who the hell were those monkeys that grabbed you in the car?”
She growled into her rye glass. “Oh, they’re some private cops dad has working for him. See, I had to do some fast talking to make dad let me use you to spook out that killer. He got to thinking it over, and decided he was going to get me out of the trouble fast. He didn’t know I’d already let you go.”
“He didn’t know you were using me to smoke out Gomez, huh?”
“Didn’t even know Gomez was alive. I had to use the picture he wanted to lead me to Gomez. Sorry I couldn’t tell you all about it either. The FBI wouldn’t let me.”
Sands scowled. “You permanent party in the Bureau?”
She smiled up at him. “As permanent as you were.”
Sands banged for another rye. “We won’t talk about that.”
“I like rye and water,” said Taffy Bell, and a smart little smile began in her eyes and travelled far and finally ended up on the faces of both of them.
“Then I guess that settles it,” said Sands, tipping his glass to hers.