The Third Figure Read Online Free PDF Page B

a drink and take stock. Since the time was almost eleven, I had no desire to call Mrs. Vennezio, and certainly I wasn’t going to call Russo for an appointment—or, for that matter, Mrs. Hanson.
    Over the drink I began thinking about my conversation with Larsen, and in the darkness of the bar, surrounded by strangers, I suddenly experienced a very lost, very lonely feeling. Larsen had been right. I’d been a vain, shortsighted fool to accept Mrs. Vennezio’s strange, illogical proposition. At best, I was a gifted amateur—with a gift that even I couldn’t define. Only the week before I’d read in a popular magazine that a noted psychologist considered clairvoyance in humans to be essentially the same as instinct in the lower animals and therefore no more remarkable than, say, the migratory instinct in birds. The author had then concluded with the speculation that clairvoyants were perhaps lower down on the evolutionary scale than ordinary humans.
    Larsen had also been right about the publicity I’d received. Most of it had been self-serving, cynically calculated to increase the Sentinel ’s circulation. True, on at least three occasions during the past few years I’d discovered a murderer. The first time had been an accident: the random flash of a wayward image on my unsuspecting consciousness, turning my footsteps blindly toward the spot where a murderer crouched in the darkness, gibbering. By chance’s caprice, the story had been picked up by the wire services. I’d been working for a small San Jose daily, and within a week’s time the San Francisco Sentinel had offered to double my salary and give me a by-line. Other successes had followed—and some failures. At first, the police were derisive, even hostile. But the police were always there. We were on the same side.
    This was different. This time, I was on my own. I was in a strange town, staying in a strange motel, drinking in a strange, lonely bar.
    As I paid for the drink and slipped off the bar stool, I was conscious that the phrase Pride goeth before a fall was beginning to revolve in my thoughts. It was a phrase my father had been fond of quoting. For him it had always had a special meaning. For me it had always been a pointless parental aphorism.
    Larsen had put it another way, warning me not to become the victim of my own publicity. If the Bible were to be written in today’s idiom, I was thinking as I walked down the long corridor to my room, that’s the way a disciple might phrase it: don’t believe your own publicity.
    By ten the following morning I’d had breakfast and was standing in a telephone booth, staring at the name F. Russo , and the number, 824-4076.
    Should I wait until tomorrow, Monday?
    Should I give it up and get a plane back to San Francisco?
    As a teen-ager, trying to get up the nerve to call a girl, I could remember standing in exactly the same uncertain posture and feeling the same sheepish doubts. I hadn’t liked the feeling then, and I didn’t like it now. It was only a phone call. I wasn’t committing myself to anything. I’d come four hundred miles and I’d spend a hundred dollars before I got back to San Francisco. If I’d been a fool to take the job, I was being a bigger fool now—and a timid one, at that.
    I was dialing the number; the line was ringing. Was it Frankie Russo’s phone? F. Russo? It seemed incredible that—
    “Hello?” It was a man’s voice.
    “Is this—” I cleared my throat. “Is this Mr. Russo? Frank Russo?”
    “No. Mr. Russo can’t come to the phone right now. Who’s calling?” The voice was brusk, impatient.
    “Well, this is—I’m Stephen Drake. I—”
    “Is Mr. Russo expecting you to call him?”
    “Well, I don’t know. That is, I’m not sure. Mrs. Vennezio—Mrs. Dominic Vennezio—made an appointment for me with Mr. Russo. She said that I should—”
    “Just a minute.” The line clicked dead. I shifted the receiver from one ear to the other. As I did, I realized that