Hell Read Online Free PDF Page B

says.
    Hatcher moves past him and into the back staircase landing of a tenement. The lightbulb juts nakedly from a fixture in a side wall, and mounting the opposite wall is a vast dark shadow of the staircase banister. Hatcher looks around him with the panic of an actor’s dream. He’s on and he doesn’t know his lines.
    Bogey steps up beside him. “Her note said 4D.”
    “4D,” Hatcher says.
    “One more thing.”
    “Yes?”
    “Put your hat on.”
    Hatcher realizes there’s something in his hand. He looks down. He holds a gun-metal gray snap-brim fedora. He puts it on.
    The rasp and hiss of a match turns his face to Bogey, who is lighting a cigarette. Bogey drags once and exhales. He reaches into his inner coat pocket and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. He flicks one partway out. It’s a Camel. He offers it to Hatcher.
    Hatcher actually hesitates because he smoked as a teenager and then stopped in J-School and he is reluctant to start again. For his health.
    Hatcher laughs a sharp, ironic laugh at this and takes the cigarette.
    Bogey strikes another match. “I don’t expect much from her either,” he says, understanding the laugh in a way that Hatcher now also understands. What can this dame have to say?
    Bogey holds the flame to the tip of Hatcher’s cigarette. Hatcher inhales. As with all the everyday earthly physical pleasures, in Hell there is only a niggling disappointment, though occasionally there is, of course, searing pain of one sort or another. With this drag on a cigarette, for Hatcher there is niggling disappointment. Followed by the brief searing pain of feeling like a teenager.
    “Let me do the talking,” Bogey says.
    Hatcher is suddenly all right. He nips with his thumb and forefinger at the tip of his snap brim. “Right,” he says.
    The two men climb the stairs. The light at the landing draws the shadow of the banister posts across their bodies first one way and then, when they turn, the other way, as if they are pacing in their jail cell.
    At the fourth floor, their two fedoras come up from the light below and into the dark at the top of the stairs. Hatcher and Bogart stop on the threadbare runner that trails down the center of the corridor. At the far end is a thin slice of light at the bottom of a doorway. Bogey nods toward it. They move to the door and Bogey knocks.
    From inside, a woman’s voice says, “Come in.” It’s a high, thin, nasally voice.
    Bogey draws a sharp breath. Hatcher looks at him, but his face is a mask of black in the dark corridor. Bogey pushes the door open.
    The tenement apartment is one room, simple and seedy, as simple and seedy as a cheap hotel room in some dirty little working-class burg. A sagging couch, a desk, a few chairs, a blank wall where the Murphy bed hides, all of it in colors that don’t even deserve the name “color.” Dingy grays and tans. And rising from a chair in the center of all this is the dame. A tiny body, fragile, chiseled features and dark, feverish eyes. Her lips are scarlet, painted large, like Satan’s own butterfly.
    Hatcher and Bogey are standing before the dame and she’s looking at the two of them, one at a time, back and forth, like she’s trying to figure out which one of them is going to throw her over his shoulder and carry her out of a burning building.
    Hatcher waits for Bogey to do the talking, but his partner isn’t saying a word. He looks at Bogey, whose face is lambent with repressed anguish, though nobody in the room would know what “lambent” means, even Hatcher at that moment, who is now very much Bogey’s fellow private eye. Hatcher lifts an eyebrow and rolls his shoulders in his wide-lapeled suit, wondering what’s going through his partner’s mind. Bogey doesn’t act like this around dames.
    Finally Bogey speaks. “You’re not who you said you were.”
    “Who’d I say I was?”
    Bogey hesitates. “Nobody.”
    “That’s me,” she says.
    “You’re not who I thought.”
    “I got no control