He caught one good glimpse of the man who had brought him upstairs. The figure was plain in the lighted room — a tall, black form, its face hidden by the collar of its cloak, and the turned-down brim of the black hat.
The echoes of a soft, uncanny laugh came to Burke’s ears. Although he had not recognized the man, he recollected the laugh.
Burke had shut his eyes momentarily. He opened them now. The light had been extinguished. The man was gone.
The noise of a car driving away was the last sound that Clyde Burke heard that night. He fell asleep immediately, through sheer exhaustion.
IN the morning, the newspaperman recalled vividly his experiences with Doctor Palermo. He knew that his visit had been real, even though everything now seemed fantastic.
Of the events following his departure from the Marimba Apartments, Burke remembered only the beginning of the ride in the taxicab, and the concluding events of his journey, when the unknown man of the night had brought him to his room.
The morning newspaper told of a killing in Central Park. A taxi driver had been shot on a side road. The dead man had been identified as a notorious gunman. The reports mentioned the fact that the windows of the cab were jammed shut, and that there was difficulty in opening them.
But the police had not noticed the opening that lay beneath the back seat, from which the deadly carbon monoxide from the exhaust had entered the back of the cab.
Clyde Burke wondered about the newspaper report. He fancied that the wrecked cab might have been the one in which he had ridden. He seemed to remember windows that refused to open.
Still, there was no mention of a passenger in the cab; nor did the newspapers tell of a phantom man in a coupe.