CHAPTER ELEVENReturn
The bell had a loud, harsh, strident note like one of those old-fashioned gongs that used to be attached to the very door itself. New wiring for the new room-and-bath apartment. Gamadge rang, waited and rang again.
She must be out, he thought; she couldn’t be as fast asleep as all that, not after one shot of neat brandy—for he was more and more convinced, as he remembered the earlier visit, that she had been cold sober when he came. He was pretty sure that sudden drowsiness had been a perfectly unanswerable way of getting rid of him. Or had she gone back to her solitary bottle after he left, and quietly drunk herself into oblivion by six in the afternoon?
That bell ought to wake the dead. He tried it again, as steps sounded on the wooden stairs.
An elderly man, nar
