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[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Death Has Many DoorsFredric Brown--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Death hath so many doors to let out life.BEAUMONT-FLETCHERTHE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRYChapter 1IT WAS hotter and muggier than most August days in Chicago. I was sitting at the desk in the outer office—it was supposed to be for a secretary if we ever got one— poking a typewriter with one finger, trying to get out a letter to a finance company on Hunter & Hunter Detective Agency letterhead. We'd solicited them for skip tracing, which means finding people who've skipped town with automobiles they haven't paid for, and they wanted our terms in writing. The letter was going slowly; I saw that unless we could afford a secretary pretty soon I'd better learn how to use at least two fingers for typing.The outer door opened a few inches and I looked at it. It closed again. But there weren't any footsteps outside; someone was standing there undecided. He'd opened the door a few inches and then he'd changed his mind and pulled it shut, but he hadn't changed his mind completely because he was still standing there.A client, maybe. If it was, I hoped he'd come in. I was tempted to go to the door and invite him in.But if you're operating a respectable agency, and we were trying to, you can't make like a South State Street used-clothing salesman and pull a hesitating prospect in by the arm. So I went back to my typing. And did even worse at it; knowing that someone was standing there listening to the clicking of the keys, I was self-conscious and embarrassed about the long intervals between clicks.The door opened again, three inches. I stopped typing and looked at it to see what was going to happen. For about seven seconds nothing happened. Then the door opened the rest of the way and a girl came in.She was tallish for a girl, about five feet eight. She had red hair and everything that should go with it. I wouldn't quite say she was beautiful, but she'd do until someone beautiful came along. She had a saucy, tilted nose and just a hint of freckles, but I'm repeating; I've already said she had everything that should go with red hair. She had a figure that was just right for her height; most tall girls tend either to be too slim or to be built like Amazons. She was feminine, too, from the nylon that showed at the tips of her open-toed shoes to the absurd little hat on top of that gorgeous hair. In age, she might have been anywhere from eighteen to twenty-five.There was only one thing wrong with the picture. She wasn't well enough dressed to look like a client. I don't mean that she was badly dressed or shabby, but her clothes were a long way from being expensive; they didn't look like money. I am no connoisseur of women's clothes and, personally, I don't care what kind they wear, if any, but I can tell expensive clothes from inexpensive ones. This girl didn't make over thirty or forty dollars a week. If she wanted any work done that took over a day or two, she wouldn't be able to afford it, even at the quite moderate rates we were charging.I stood up and came around the desk as she came in, but I let her speak first.“Is Mr. Hunter in?” Her voice was nice.“Both Mr. Hunters,” I said. “I'm Ed Hunter. The other one is Ambrose Hunter, my uncle. He's here too.” I glanced toward the door of the inner office. Uncle Am was in, all right, but like as not asleep with his feet on the desk; he'd got into a poker game last night and had been put until almost four o'clock in the morning.“I guess either one of you will do,” she said. “It's about something I'd like you to do for me.”“A case, you mean?” I asked her. If she did, I'd let Uncle Am do the talking, but before I bothered him I thought I might as well make sure she wasn't selling magazine subscriptions or collecting donations for a home for indigent mice or something.But she nodded in answer to my question so I went to the door of the inner office and knocked on it to give Uncle Am a chance to wake up and get his feet down before I opened the door and turned to the girl.“This way, Miss—?”“Doerr,” she said. “Sally Doerr.”I followed her in and made the introduction. I said, “You don't mind if both of us listen to what you have to say, do you, Miss Doerr? If we can accept your case, either or both of us may work on it, so it may save time if we both get the facts right away.”She nodded again and sat down in the chair Uncle Am was holding for her. He looked at me over her shoulder and made a funny face and then winked. I didn't know why, then.He went back behind his desk and sat down. I took a chair and pulled it up at the side, where I could watch the girl. She was definitely worth watching; I suppose that was my real reason for horning in on the interview.Nothing happened right away except that Sally Doerr opened her handbag and got out a cigarette. I leaned over and lighted it for her.Uncle Am cleared his throat and started the ball rolling by saying, “Well, Miss Doerr?” He smiled at her, the smile making his round face look like that of a cheerful, middle-aged cherub—if you can picture a cherub with a scraggly brown mustache.“I—I need someone to protect me, Mr. Hunter,” she said. “Someone is trying to kill me.”“Do you know who, and why?”“Well—in a way, yes. But one trouble is, Mr. Hunter, I haven't a lot of money. I've got a hundred dollars with me, and I can get about another hundred if I have to, but—I'm afraid that may not be very much.”It sounded like a lot to me, more than I'd expected her to have. But if by protection she meant a twenty-four-hour-a-day bodyguard service, it wouldn't cover a very long period.Uncle Am said, “Let's not go into the financial angle until we know more about the rest of it, Miss Doerr. First, tell me, have you been to the police about this?”“Yes, but they said they couldn't do anything. I—I don't think they believed me. They wouldn't even listen to all that I had to tell them.”That didn't sound too good, but it could happen all right if she got the wrong man on a busy day and the start of her story didn't sound too good.But Uncle Am looked at me before he looked back at the girl. “Who, Miss Doerr, do you think is going to try to kill you?”“Martians.”“Martians? You mean—men from Mars, the planet Mars?”She nodded, and that was that. We'd wasted ten minutes on a psycho.Uncle Am sighed and his swivel chair creaked. “I'm afraid, Miss Doerr, that we won't be able to help you either.”She leaned forward and I saw how suddenly frightened her eyes were. But she kept her voice calm. “You think I'm crazy. That's it, isn't it?”It was a toughie, and I wondered how Uncle Am would manage to answer it. He did all right. “It's not my business to judge that, Miss Doerr. For all I know, you may be right. But if you are, we'd be taking your money under false pretenses if we offered to protect you. You see—”He smiled wryly. “You see, we're just run-of-the-mine private detectives; we're not trained or equipped to protect you against any such—uh—esoteric menace, even if it exists.”“You could try. And I don't care whether you believe me or not, if you'll only try.”“Miss Doerr, I'm afraid we can't.”“But it's just for a short time. And I've really got a hundred dollars with me. If I pay—”Uncle Am shook his head slowly. “Money isn't the reason, Miss Doerr. Uh—may I ask how you happened to choose us, instead of a larger agency?”It took me a second to figure out why he'd asked that. There wasn't any way we could have been chosen at random; we'd been in business only a few weeks, and, while we had a telephone, it was too new for us to be listed in the classified section of the phone book. The only jobs we'd got thus far were from companies, mostly finance companies, whom we'd solicited for work.She said, “A Mr. Starlock, of the Starlock Detective Agency, recommended you. I picked his agency out of the phone book and went to him. He said he was too busy, but he gave me your address and recommended you very highly. He said that both of you used to work for him before you started your own business.”That explained it, all right. Ben Starlock had passed the buck to us, as a gag. He knew both of us well enough to know we wouldn't take her money to protect her from Martians. There are plenty of detective agencies in Chicago that would.Uncle Am said, “I see, Miss Doerr. Well, I'm sorry, but—”She hadn't given up yet. “Mr. Hunter, do you think it's fair of you not even to admit a possibility, however slight, that I'm not insane?”That was another toughie, but Uncle Am handled it. He said, “I'm not even implying that you're insane, Miss Doerr. I definitely think you are mistaken. Just as, for example, I believe that people who believe in ghosts are mistaken, although plenty of quite sane people believe in them.” He shrugged. “Maybe I'm wrong on both counts. Maybe there are ghosts. Maybe there are Martians operating on Earth. But if we don't believe in them—if we don't have faith in what our client tells us—it would be dishonest for us to take that client's money, or to accept him as a client in the first place. Don't you see that?”“But if I pay you, why do you care whether you believe me or not?”Uncle Am sighed again. “I'm afraid we do care, Miss Doerr. I'm sorry, but—definitely—we can't accept the case.”Suddenly she cried. Not violently, not even aloud, but there were tears running down her cheeks. She dabbed at them with a foolish little handkerchief and stood up. She ran toward the doorway and through it. She closed the door after... [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
