Mourn the Hangman by Harry Whittington

replaced the receiver. He got his damp trousers from under the mattress and dressed, hearing the faint, taunting strains of the radio. He wound his watch and strapped it back around his wrist. It was 5:28 A.M.
    At the door, he looked once more about the room, the towel on the floor, the covers kicked back. Well, he’d thought he could sleep in this room. But sleep, too, was for the living.
    He dropped the room key in his pocket. He closed the door of the room after him. He heard the click of a lock and stopped, watching the hall.
    The door of room 305 was opened and a dark haired girl stepped out into the hall. She was wearing a white smock, belted tightly at her tiny waist. Her wavy hair was brushed and rolled under a net. For a moment they stared across the space of the dim corridor at each other. Then she smiled. Blake was positive he’d seen her somewhere before, but he couldn’t remember where or when.
    “Hello,” she said, “don’t you remember me?”
    Blake shook his head, but said, “Yes. You’re the girl in 305. You play your radio all night.”
    “It’s the only way I can sleep,” she said. “I’m sorry if it annoyed you. I didn’t know you lived here.”
    “I don’t,” Blake said. “I’m burglaring the rooms. Yours is next.”
    She looked at him. “You really don’t remember me, do you? At the Palm Club. My name is Sammy. Sammy Anderson. Don’t you know? I returned your wallet — without even looking at the French postcards in it.”
    “Oh, yes,” Blake said. “I remember.”
    “I still have the five dollars,” she said with a faint smile.
    “Then men are bigger fools nowadays than they were when I was young,” Blake said. He started past her along the corridor.
    “I’m on my way to breakfast,” Sammy said.
    “Are you?” Blake said. He ignored the implied invitation in her voice. “Aren’t you up kind of early — working till midnight at the Palm Club?”
    “I — I’ll go back to bed after I eat,” she said. “It’s just that I hate it at night. I don’t like night. I try to make it end as quickly as possible.”
    She started walking with him toward the steps. Blake could see that the girl wanted to say something to him, without knowing how to begin. They descended the stairs in silence. When they reached the street, the girl looked up at him in the vague light of the Regal Hotel doorway. Her dark brows were knotted. She bit down on her full underlip. But all she said was, “Be careful.”
    There was a cab at the curb and Blake got into it, giving Dickerson’s Gale Island address. He sat back in the cab wondering what Sammy Anderson had wanted to say to him.
    He got out a block away from Dickerson’s big stucco house. As he went along the walk, he watched the first fingers of dawn fumbling upward through the rifts in the black sky.
    He rang the doorbell once. Dickerson let him stand there for five minutes. Finally, he cracked open the door and said, “All right, Blake. Come in.”
    The house was still in darkness. Dickerson led the way through it into the library. He closed the door after them and then snapped on a small light over his blond-wood desk. The faint light left webs of shadow in every corner of the room. Dickerson, a tall, humorless man with gray hair, sat down, gestured to a chair.
    But Blake went on standing.
    “All right,” Dickerson said. “What is it you’ve got, Steve?”
    “Trouble,” Steve replied.
    Dickerson didn’t smile. “I hope you know how much trouble, Blake. You’re wanted for murder. Your description is being blared on every radio in the area, every hour on the hour.” Blake felt the shock of that. Had that been what Sammy Anderson had wanted to tell him? “You’re absolutely no more good to me, Blake. I hope you understand that. Your value to us remained in your being just an ordinary guy at work in Arrenhower’s plant. If anyone in that plant knows who you are — ”
    “They know,” Steve told him.
    “How do you