"So can a cyanide soda," Fleetwood said dully. "Sweet and final." He lifted her arm away from his neck, and it might have been a noose. He let it drop.
When he went out the door her smile had got itself all bent.
The hallways of the Grande Apartments were carpeted as thickly as the living quarters. It was the only place in town where you could sneak up on someone at a dead trot. Fleetwood plushed along in the direction of the elevators. He was nearly there, just abreast of a drinking fountain, when it hit him, just like it had those other times before. He stopped and reached out a hand to steady himself against the fountain.
In a moment his head began to clear a little and he straightened, running a lean, trembling hand through his carrot-colored hair. Even so he clung to the fountain a bit longer and when he finally let go it was only to free his hand so he could check his pulse. The attacks were coming closer together now, he reflected. But so were the events which usually led up to them—the incidents of violence, the sight of blood.
It was crazy, a sort of general softening and mellowing, the kind of thing that makes you bait for the boys with the cushiony couches and the expensive ears. It was downright absurd. He had to get hold of himself.
He searched his mind warily for his own thoughts, as an agent might search for saboteurs. He looked for those innermost stirrings of the soul, the ones that breathe of fear and anxiety. But there was nothing. And that was crazy too. It was as though he'd never had a thought in his life, or even an experience from which to draw a thought. It was like amnesia, and yet it wasn't amnesia at all. He knew that he was Fleetwood Cassidy and he knew that he was a private investigator who worked independently. But that was where he ran into the wall. But the really frightening part of it was the veiled feeling that even if he should manage to scale the wall and look behind it, he'd find—exactly nothing!
Of course, he told himself, the thing to do was to think back to that place in time where the spells—the softening—had begun. There lay the real clue. But it was so much easier said than done. He could project his thoughts backwards, after some effort, to the day before when he had jumped into a taxi, shouted to the driver to "follow that car," then found himself in a nervous panic lest they were travelling at a rate of speed in excess of the legal limit. But that was just another small, humiliating example—by no means the beginning.
He forced his thoughts back still farther, but it was rather like ramrodding a rifle with a ballbat. He arrived finally, by dint of the most extreme concentration, back in the apartment of that sloe-eyed, full-lipped and tempestuous beauty, Dolores Nobella. He had given her a hundred dollars for evidence against her mother, and she had lifted her skirts with a graceful, crimson-taloned hand and inserted the bills deftly in the top of her stocking. All of a sudden it had come to Fleetwood that Dolores, even for a girl with long legs, wore disturbingly tall stockings—and he had turned away, coloring at the collar. He, Fleetwood Cassidy, had blushed, and what was more, now that he thought of it he blushed again.