by Jerry eBooks
I shook my head. “There’s no place far enough, honey. And if there were, there’s nothing fast enough to get me there.”
“Jesus, Andy, you can’t just sit and wait for it. There has to be something we can do.”
“There is. I said it was up to you. Something pleasant, I said.”
She came back then, and my hands crept in under mink, and it was as if she was trying desperately to give me everything in no time at all, but a taxi’s no place for it, a taxi prescribes limits, and so pretty soon I said, “We’d better go to my place, honey.”
“That’s where we’re going. I told the cabbie.”
“Sweet baby.”
“I can’t stay, though, darling.”
“Why the hell not?”
“I’ve got to get back.”
“To Leo?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t be a fool. He kicked you out. Remember?”
“Look, Andy. It was just because he’d been humiliated, and I’d seen it happen. It was just because his bloated little ego couldn’t stand my seeing it. When I get back, it’ll be different. By that time, he’ll be wanting me so bad it’ll be stronger than anything else, even stronger than the effect of my seeing him slapped in the chops like a fat brat.” Her voice sank to a thin complaint. “I’ve been earning the rent, Andy. Believe me, I earn it in plenty of service and a thousand futile damn regrets.”
“Don’t tell me. I don’t want to hear it.”
“It’s for us, Andy. If I left him, it still wouldn’t clear things for us. He’d have us both killed. Can’t you see it’s for us? You’re the only one I really ever want it from, darling. Just you.”
“You’re forgetting something, honey. I’m the guy who clobbered him tonight. He’s going to have me taken care of, anyhow.”
“Maybe not. Maybe I can stop him. If I go back tonight, I think I can stop him. Not entirely, of course. He’ll want something out of you. Something to salvage his pig’s vanity. But I can make it something less than death. Then it’ll be you and me, Andy, the same as now, and there’ll be a thousand nights together to make up for this one.”
“Sure. You and me. You and me and Leo.”
“We’ll find a way to eliminate Leo later on. A safe way. Sometime, somehow, we’ll find a way.”
I was tired. I was a tired, broke, sick damn fool, but I had no particular desire to die, and I wanted Hilda wholly or on shares, any way I could get her whenever she wanted to come. I leaned back in the seat and said, “You save it for us, honey. I’ll be waiting around.”
The taxi wheeled into my street and stopped, and I got out and stood beside it on the curb. Hilda leaned out after me, her face lifted above her white, arched throat, and I leaned down and kissed her without touching her with anything but my lips. Then the taxi pulled us apart, and I went inside and upstairs alone.
What do you do with the twenty-four hours that may be your last? Get drunk? Get religion? Go crazy? I guess it depends on who you are, how much that next breath means to you. For what it signifies, I had one drink, one cigarette, and went to bed. I also slept. I slept long and well, and when I woke up I saw by the watch on my wrist that it was far past noon. I got up and oriented, and I didn’t feel so good, but I didn’t feel so bad, either. Sort of so-so. Sort of like almost any garden variety day. I went into the bathroom and showered and shaved and brushed the fur off my teeth. I dressed and asked myself if I was hungry, and I decided that I wasn’t hungry but that I could do with a drink. I had the stuff available, rye and bourbon, but I didn’t want a drink alone in the apartment. I wanted a drink in a bar. This seemed a reasonable desire for a guy well into his last time around the clock, so I went out to gratify it.
I got the drink at Stony’s. Stony himself poured it for me. He asked me how I was, and I said I was all right. After drinking half of what he’d poured, I almost believed it. Someone in a booth paid a nickel for Many Times, which isn’t a bad tune in itself, but it started me thinking about Hilda trying to make Leo see that I wasn’t worth killing, and that wasn’t good. I tried to quit thinking about it, but little details kept forcing their way into my mind which may or may not have been parts of the way it actually happened, so I lifted my drink to finish it, and in the process I saw something that made me think for a moment that it hadn’t happened at all. In the mirror behind the bar, I saw a character named Jack Steap, a thin guy with a body like ten-gauge wire and a face like the edge of a razor. He was a guy for hire who worked for Leo Gall when Leo needed a fast, professional job, and he was standing precisely behind the empty stool on my right. One hand was in the pocket of his coat, very casually. I felt, suddenly, dry and withered inside, all dead and done and ready for the fire.
He said softly in a thin tenor voice, “Okay, hero. Let’s go.”
I turned on the stool, and it was then that I realized that he hadn’t spoken to me at all. His eyes and voice were directed toward the customer on the other side of the empty stool. He’d come in a few minutes after me, and we were now the only ones at the bar. He looked like a college guy. He was wearing a hat, but the hair that showed below it was blond, and I knew it was cut short and square on top. I was a little surprised to see that he still had the price of a drink. Hugh Lawson, I mean.
If he ever recognized me, he didn’t show it. He looked over his shoulder at the gunsel and said, “You talking to me?”
“You, hero. Let’s go.”
“What the hell you talking about?”
Jack Steap showed his teeth in a smile that was all on the plane. No depth, no meaning. “You know, hero. Just for kicks, though, I’ll brief you on it. I’m talking about your dropping a bundle to Leo Gall last night. I’m talking about your coming back later to reclaim it. It and the other lettuce Leo’d won, plus fifty grand or so he had lying around for household expenses. It was real messy, the way you did it. Smashing his skull that way. Leo’s head was a real mess.”
Hugh Lawson spun around slowly on his stool. His face had gone white and slack, and the first wash of fear was coming up into his eyes. His voice was a sick croak. “You’re crazy! Leo was alive when I left. Kal Magnus and I went together.”
“I know. Kal went and stayed. You didn’t. You went back.”
“I didn’t! I swear I didn’t!”
“Sure you swear you didn’t. But you did. You were seen, hero. You were seen leaving the apartment by someone else who went back. Someone on Leo’s team. So the word went out to Leo’s boys. So the boys sent me out to find you. So here I am. And so let’s go.”
A greenish tinge began to creep into the dead white of Lawson’s face. It was the face of a man who knew that nothing he could say would make any difference. His mouth labored to create sound, but the most it managed was a whimper, and his eyes slithered around desperately for help that wasn’t there. They crossed my face, his eyes, but I don’t think I registered in them. Then he was off the stool and running parallel to the bar. He must have intended to duck around it and out the back way into the alley, but he never made it. Jack Steap’s hand came out of his pocket, and there were two muffled detonations so close together that they almost blended, and Hugh Lawson stopped and turned half around and leaned back against the bar like a guy who might have stopped in for a short beer. After a moment, he slipped down to a sitting position and toppled over sideways.
There was a long moment of dead silence in the bar, and then the five or six customers in booths got up and out before the cops got in.
Jack Steap walked down along the bar, stepped over Lawson’s body, and went on out the way Lawson had wanted to go.
I went that way myself. I went out into the alley and down the alley to the street and back to my apartment.
I went inside and closed the door and leaned back against it with my eyes closed. Something was hurting inside me, and the hurting was related to the death of Hugh Lawson. He was a guy I hadn’t known well and had neither liked nor disliked, but I didn’t want him dead at the hands of a thin weas
el like Jack Steap for the sake of a fat pig like Leo Gall. Not even when his death was maybe my salvation.
Hilda’s voice said, “What’s the matter, darling?”
I opened my eyes, and there she was. She was there like something beautiful and warm and real that I needed like hell. I started for her, and she started for me, and we met and merged somewhere between our starting places.
“It’s all right, darling,” she said. “Leo’s dead.”
“I know he’s dead. So’s Hugh Lawson. I just saw him shot down in Stony’s place.”
“Leo’s boys think Hugh’s the one who killed Leo.”
“I know. That’s what the gunsel said.”
“Don’t you see what it means, darling? It means you and me in the open. You and me without a worry. We can go away for a while. South, I think. Somewhere a long way south of the border.”
“Using what for money?”
She broke out of my arms then and went for her purse in a chair. It was a big job, almost as big as an overnight bag, one of these things on a strap that’s worn over the shoulder. She picked it up and brought it back and turned it upside down, and paper began to fall out. Green paper. I thought it’d never quit falling. It fell and spread and piled up around my feet.
I raised my eyes to her face, and it was still the loveliest face I’d ever seen, smooth and creamy under copper, with a bright and gifted mouth and smoky eyes.
“You,” I said. “You killed Leo and put the finger on Lawson.”
She shook her head. “No. I put the finger on Lawson, all right, but I didn’t kill Leo.”
“Lawson really did, then?”
“No. Neither me nor Lawson.”
“Who?”
She looked at me and smiled and said, “You did, darling.”
I reached out and took her by the shoulders and dug in. “What the hell’s this? I never went back there.”
“I know you didn’t. Look, Andy. When I was a kid on southside, I used to watch the fellows play ball in the street. One day a kid we called Fats got hit in the head with a bat. He was out for a few minutes, and his head hurt for a while, but pretty soon he started to play again, and it was almost half an hour later when he dropped dead. Concussion acts like that sometimes, and that’s the way Leo died. You remember how his head smacked the sharp frame of the sofa? He got up and chased us out, and he got ready for bed, and he dropped dead.”
“Wait a minute. The gunsel said his head was a mess.”
“That was just for looks, darling. He was already dead when I got back. If I’d left him the way I found him, it would’ve been easy to figure what had really happened.”
“So you mess him up and help yourself to his money and finger an innocent guy for the rap.”
“For you, darling. For you and me.”
“You think I’d touch the lousy money now? Or you?”
“Yes, darling. The money and me. Without us, it’s so much paper. With us, it’s more fun than you ever dreamed of in that place we’ll find below the border.”
I kept on looking at her, and I kept on wanting her, in spite of everything, and I told myself that there’s a point beyond which you can’t go. You can skirt the dark edge, you can do things that later make you sick to your stomach, but there’s a point beyond which you can’t go if your soul is ever to be your own again. That’s what I told myself, and I told myself that I had reached the point.
Now I’ll tell you something: it’s hot down here. It’s hot as hell below the border.
DOUBLE
Bruno Fischer
1.
The girl woke up gradually. I didn’t shake her or say her name. I just stood at the side of the bed looking down at her.
Holly Laird, a smalltime actress, but she could have been Martha seven years ago. That stubborn little chin and that trick of a nose, but mostly the hair.
Hair that lay spread like gold on the pillow.
Actresses slept late. It was close to ten in the morning and the sun was high, streaming in through the east window and touching her face. She brought up an arm as if trying to brush the sunlight away; her other hand pushed down the blanket to her waist. Her breasts were beautiful, and the rose-colored nightgown did hardly anything to cover them.
Martha used to go in for nightgowns like that, fragile and transparent. I remembered how I used to watch Martha asleep beside me—how mornings I would prop myself up on one elbow and never take my eyes off her.
Three years of marriage and being crazy in love with her, and then Martha had run off with another man—a public accountant, of all things, a skinny guy I could have broken in two with one hand but never got a chance to. And now it was as if I’d gone back through all the years and I was looking at her in bed, and the bitterness seized me, welling up in my throat so I almost choked.
Holly Laird’s eyelids fluttered. I’d made no sound; in sleep she must have sensed me standing there. I took a step back from the bed, and suddenly she was staring at me. Her eyes went wider and wider.
I didn’t tell her there was no reason to be scared. I wanted her to be scared, to start her off with a taste of shock that would make her plenty jittery.
Then she came all the way awake and her breasts stirred as she let out her breath. “You’re the detective,” she said. “The one who asked me most of the questions at the police station yesterday.”
“That’s right, miss. Gus Taylor. I’m in charge of the case.”
I sat down. It was a small apartment—one cramped room and bath and kitchenette. She rented it furnished. I had found out a lot about her.
“But how did you get in?” she said. “I’m sure I locked the door.”
“I got in.”
She sat up. “Picked the lock or used a passkey, I suppose. You . . .! Even though you’re a policeman, you have no right . . .”
In the dresser mirror I could see myself sitting with my hands curved over my knees. They were big hands, strong hands. I was proud of their strength. I was a big, hard guy who didn’t take anything from anybody, and I was proud of that, too.
“I don’t stand on ceremony with murderers,” I said.
“But I told you and told you I didn’t kill him.”
“Yeah, you told me.”
I smiled at her. She glanced down at herself sitting up in bed and she saw how little of her the bodice covered and how the rest of her from the waist up shimmered rosy through the rose-colored nylon. She snatched up the blanket to her throat.
“What do you want?” she demanded.
“You know damn well, miss. The truth. Night before last you pushed a knife into John Ambler’s heart.”
“No!”
I took out a cigarette and slowly turned it in my fingers. She watched me with blue eyes—the same shade as Martha’s. Or Martha’s had been a bit lighter. It was hard to remember exactly after so long.
After a silence Holly Laird said tartly, “I’d like to get dressed.”
I put a light to my cigarette and didn’t move from the chair facing the bed and didn’t say anything.
“So it’s a form of third degree?” she said. “You’re going to sit there and sit there.”
“Only till you tell me you killed him.”
“You’re so sure, aren’t you?”
I said, “It figures, miss. Let me tell you how close it figures so you’ll know you can’t hold out. You’re a smalltown girl who got the acting bug. Like thousands of others. You went to New York to set Broadway on its ear. The nearest you got to a stage was when you bought a ticket to a show. But in New York you met John Ambler, who spent a lot of time there because he was backing a play. What they call an angel. You got chummy with him.”
“Acquainted, that was all.”
“I know how girls who want to get on the stage get acquainted with rich angels. And I know a thing or two about the late John Ambler. He has a good-looking wife, but I hear he likes to play outside the homestead, especially with young actresses. That was why he went in fo
r backing plays on Broadway, and here in his home town he’s the big money behind the repertory theater. So he brought you here to Coast City and told the director to give you big parts in the different plays they put on every few weeks.”
“I earned every role. I can act.”
“Maybe. But there are lots of others can act and don’t get leading parts right off, not even in a small-city theater like ours. George Hoge, the director, says Ambler ordered him to use you no matter what. Ambler’s the angel, so Hoge had to do it. And if I knew Ambler he kept wanting payment from you. He was that kind of a guy.”
“But I’m not that kind of girl.”
I laughed harshly in my throat. Nobody could tell me anything about women. I’d been through it; I knew. They were every last one of them like Martha.
“Besides,” Holly said, “everybody in the theater can tell you I’m in love with Bill Burnett. Doesn’t that prove I wasn’t carrying on an affair with Mr. Ambler?”
“All it proves is you’re like the rest of ’em.”
“The rest of who?”
“Two-timing bitches,” I said, and took a drag at the cigarette. “All right, let’s see about Burnett. Mostly he took you home after the show. But not the night before last. He’s on the stage till the final curtain, but you’re through before the last scene. You left with Ambler. Witnesses saw you go.”
“I never denied I went with him. I told you yesterday I had a headache. It was killing me; I could hardly remember my lines. I asked George Hoge if I could leave before the curtain call. Mr. Ambler happened to be backstage and heard me and offered to drive me home.”
“Neat. Ambler happened to be backstage. Happened to drive you home. Happened to get himself murdered while you were in the car with him. How dumb do you think cops are?”
She cowered against the headboard of the bed, but she wasn’t anywhere near breaking. Those blue eyes of hers were defiant. She said, “He dropped me off at the house and drove away.”
“Drove away?” I caught her up on that. “Then how come in the morning his car was still down there in the street in front of the building and he was slumped over the wheel with a knife wound in his heart? Answer me: how come?”