Free Death Is My Comrade by Stephen Marlowe Page B

started up the stoop.
    â€œHey, you’re not Al.”
    â€œI’m a friend of Al’s. Leo’s expecting me.”
    â€œCan I come back and have a beer with you boys? I’m clean out. It’s hot. Leo said—”
    â€œLater.”
    â€œWhere’s Al? He’s cute. He knows how to treat Mindy.”
    â€œHe had a date,” I said.
    â€œWell, you say hello to Leo for me.”
    â€œI’ll do that,” I said, and went up the stoop past her. As I opened the hall door I heard a car pulling up, then a sudden swell in the blaring rock’n’roll music as the bar-and-grill door opened. Then there was the sound of a car door shutting, and Mindy’s voice raised querulously. Night sounds, all of them familiar on Custer Street. There’s nothing in any of it for you, I told myself; you’re jumpy.
    Inside, the vestibule was lit by a single naked bulb. I left the inner door open, and the light threw my elongated shadow dimly down the hall ahead of me.
    The hall smelled of stale air and the detritus of too many lives spent too wearily in the skid row morass of Custer Street. Just past the vestibule were two doors, one on either side. At the far end of the hall, a single door. That would be Leo’s.
    I went there, took a deep breath and knocked.
    Silence for three seconds. I could hear Mindy’s childlike treble outside. She was getting loud.
    Then, from inside the door: “Al? Christ, it took you long enough. You get it?”
    â€œUmm.”
    I heard lock tumblers fall. I stood at arm’s length from the door; I didn’t want light from inside Leo’s apartment striking my face. The door opened four inches. A head on a level with my shoulder blocked the light inside.
    â€œI told you,” Leo said. “I told you it would be a cinch. An easy grand for each of us. Come on in.”
    He started to open the door. I let my right hand drop toward the butt of the Magnum.
    Just then Mindy shouted from the vestibule: “Leo! Hey, Leo! There’s a man here wants to see you.”
    I thought she meant me. I was to learn differently. Then two things happened at once. I pulled the Magnum clear of my belt and Leo opened the door wide.
    He was a wiry little man, shirtless, with a ruff of dry brown hair on his head and none on his bare chest. Light streamed past him from inside the apartment. “Who is—” he began. Then his jaw dropped. “You ain’t Al!”
    I moved a shoulder toward the door but, standing back away from it, I had too much distance to cover. Leo’s face disappeared and the door slammed. I rapped on it with the butt of the Magnum.
    Just once. It was too quiet inside. Instinct made me flatten myself against the wall.
    â€œLeo!” Mindy called again.
    Then four jagged holes exploded in the wood of the door and four shots rang out. Mindy screamed.
    On the other side of Leo’s door footsteps pounded, going away. I was still standing with my back to the wall, facing the vestibule. Mindy’s girth appeared there. Her arm moved and light flooded the hall. Behind Mindy’s shoulder a head appeared, shaggily gray-haired.
    Footsteps pounding away, a car stopping in the darkness outside—I had an eerie sense of déjà vue , as if Friday night’s phony rape scene were starting all over again. Because the face I saw behind Mindy was Semyon Laschenko’s.
    He was sweating from either heat or anxiety or both. Mopping his forehead with a handkerchief, sucking at his clipped gray moustache, he said: “Drum? Is it really you, Mr. Drum?”
    Instead of answering him I whirled, stepped back, tucked the Magnum in my belt, grasped the doorframe on both sides and kicked flat-footed at the door, just below the knob. It splintered and gave, the bolt taking a jagged section of doorframe with it.
    I lunged inside after it, found myself in an untidy living room furnished the way you’d expect a living room