Bruno Fischer

by J. Max Gilbert

  “He took me by surprise, the way he did Rufus and Beezie.”

  That was a neat thrust and brought mild annoyance to Moon’s face. He didn’t pursue the subject. He hugged Molly closer. “What happened to you, sweetheart?”

  “I tripped,” she muttered. “There must have been a rock.”

  “Where were you going, sweetheart?”

  “If there had been shooting, I would have been in the line of fire.” Molly ignored the breeze which tugged the lower half of her blue robe open and spread a straggle of hair over her face. “I was stepping out of the way when I tripped.”

  Scowling, Tilly drew her coat tighter over her nightgown. “It looked to me like she threw herself at Milton.”

  “Did you see her do that?” Moon asked her.

  “Well, I saw her falling.” This was one time that Tilly was uncertain about anything. “It seems funny, though, that she should fall right at Milton who had the rifle “

  I said angrily: “What the hell is this, anyway? Didn’t I deliver Larry to you wrapped and sealed?”

  “And a good job you did, Bert,” Moon smiled down at Molly’s windblown hair as he said that. His free hand went around to the pocket of her robe. Two fingers slipped in and brought out her pearl-handled automatic.

  Molly threw her head back. “That’s mine, George. You can’t want it for a trophy. Put it back in my pocket.”

  “Can I borrow it, sweetheart? I don’t like to carry guns, but if I have to I prefer little ones like this.” He gave her hip an affectionate pat and strode down the hill.

  The rest of us straggled after him. I waited for Molly. She had no whispered word for me; her gaze was fixed on the flashlight beam I held at our feet. Walking at my side, with her shoulder sometimes brushing my upper arm, she was as aloof from me as she had been from Moon in the circle of his arm.

  Milton squatted beside the body, admiring his handiwork. “Got him through the back of the head,” he announced proudly. “I don’t miss what I see, and the moon was plain on him.”

  “Take a look at a rat, Bert,” Moon told me conversationally. He twirled Molly’s gun by the trigger guard. “A few days ago there were two of them, and now there is none. That’s what happens to doublecrossers.”

  Molly stood too straight and her face was too tight, as if she were holding every nerve and muscle rigid. Carefully she did not look at the dead man.

  Tilly said viciously: “Don’t be so damn cocky, George. Guys get away with bags from under your nose. What are you going to do about that?”

  “Get it back,” Moon replied evenly. “Breen can’t use it himself. He’ll get in touch with me and ask a steep price. He thinks because he’s hiding out I can’t reach him.”

  Tilly sneered. “There are others who’ll pay plenty for it.”

  The little gun stopped twirling. Moon’s big hand snapped over it. “He’ll be awful sorry if he tries it, Tilly. Awful sorry.”

  He moved on with Tilly, leaving Milton and Beezie to dispose of the body. Molly walked between Rufus and myself. Rufus had stuck a gun into each pocket. He was a shadow, a guard, or maybe just a man who wanted company back to the house.

  In the downstairs hall the five of us paused. Moon yawned. Rufus opened his windbreaker and scratched his naked chest which was a lot hairier than his scalp. Tilly offered to make coffee; she said she had most of a pie left. It was very amiable. The night air and the business of killing a man had worked up their appetites for a midnight snack.

  “I’m tired,” Molly said dully. She paused halfway up the stairs and looked back. “Are you coming, honey?”

  I said good night to the others and followed her. She entered the room ahead of me, and when I was closing the door I heard her sob. She stood with her back to me, her shoulders bowed, her face in her hands. The hard core of her had cracked. Now she was only a shaken, weeping woman.

  I put an arm about her shoulders. Her face lifted from her hands. She sniffled, and like a little girl she ran the sleeve of her robe over her eyes. “I guess I’m not so tough.” She forced the ghost of a smile to the corners of her mouth.

  “You said that before,” I said. “No, you’re not so tough, and neither am I.”

  “Tilly was right. I deliberately fell into Milton to give that man Larry a chance to escape.”

  “I know.”

  She drew away from me and turned to the dresser for a cigarette. “I don’t know why I did it. I had never seen him before. He meant nothing to me, less than nothing. But to see a man killed in cold blood! To stand by and watch it!” A match flared and the flame quivered at the tip of her cigarette, “I had to do something. I would have used my gun, I think, but they were scattered and I couldn’t get the drop on them.”

  “I know how you felt. I would have tried to save him if there had been a chance.” I laughed bitterly. “Saved Larry! That’s what comes of being civilized. But I had reason to be grateful to him. He didn’t give me away.”

  “He knew it wouldn’t have helped him.” She opened her robe.

  “I’ll turn my back while you dress,” I said.

  “Dress? Do you think they’ll let us walk out of here?”

  I had been wondering about that. I went out to the hall. Their voices flowed up from the lunchroom. I went halfway down the stairs and listened.

  “Didn’t he catch Larry for us?” Rufus was saying. “All you got against him is Clara tripped against Milton.”

  Moon drawled: “If I thought there was anything fishy about it, they’d be joining Larry under the ground this minute. Bert looks pretty good to me. I like the way he took Larry. I can use him in Florida this winter. Maybe he can be worked in to take Jasper’s place.”

  “And you can use his wife sooner,” Tillie snapped. “You can’t kid me why you took their guns. You’re not sure how Bert will act about you making a play for his wife. You want his teeth pulled till you’re sure.”

  “Bert’s a tough baby, boss,” Rufus said. “A guy who can handle Larry with his bare hands is plenty tough. You’re asking for trouble.”

  “How about minding your own damn business?” Moon said without heat, and he laughed.

  I returned to the room. Molly lay in bed. The cover was up to her waist and her hair was honey spread on the white pillow.

  “They’re not guarding us,” I told her. “They think we’re okay. I don’t see how they can think anything else after, I handed Larry over to them. A cop or a -rival gang spy wouldn’t have done that.”

  She closed her eyes. “But Moon took our guns.”

  “He’s playing safe. I heard him say that he plans to send me to Florida.”

  “And keep me here, I suppose.”

  “If I let him get away with it. No, he must be sure I wouldn’t. Perhaps he plans to kill me in such a way that you wouldn’t suspect he did it and then he’ll have you for himself. I don’t know how a mind like his works. But listen. We can slip out through the side door .and in ten seconds be away in your car.”

  She lay thinking that over. Then she said: “How do we know my car will start? Maybe he fixed it so that it won’t. Maybe he’ll have us watched all night. You said you don’t know how his mind works. This could be a final test. It’s safer to wait till tomorrow. Nothing else will happen tonight.”

  “And then what?” I said hollowly. “What happens after I get away tonight or tomorrow or the next day?”

  Her eyes hadn’t opened. Her breasts were taut against the silk pajamas. When she didn’t answer, I went to the chair by the window and sat in it.

  I sucked my cracked knuckles. “And I did it,” I said. “I caught Larry for him, and Larry coming here to spy proved to Moon that he hadn’t kidnaped Adam Breen. Now Moon will go after Carol again. He’ll hold her as a club over me not to sell the bag to anybody else. What have I accomplished? I’m worse off than when I came here.”

  She seemed to be asleep. I removed my jacket and shoes and put out the light and returned to the chair. The car lot was quiet and dark
. I wondered where Crooked Nose was and who he was and why he had come here. I wondered if Larry was being buried beside other men who had died with bullets in them.

  After a while I heard Molly weep again, so softly that her weeping sounded like ragged sighing. I left the chair and sat on the edge of the bed. Her hand, pale in moonlight, reached for mine.

  “Lie down here,” she whispered.

  I stretched out at her side, over the cover. Her face pressed against my chest. I put an arm under her and her head shifted to my shoulder. My mouth touched her brow and slid down her cheek. I tasted tears and a tragic mouth.

  Presently we slept, she under the cover and me on it. We slept in each other’s arms like two lost babes in the woods.

  The sun was bright in my eyes. Gently I pulled my arm from under her. She moaned and turned on her side and dug her face into the pillow, but she did not awaken.

  I slipped off the bed: I was fully dressed except for shoes and jacket, but with my back to the bed I stripped completely and put on the fresh underwear, shirt and socks I had bought yesterday in Badmont. My face looked back at me in the dresser mirror. The bruise on my cheek had darkened still more and my eyes were unfamiliar. I didn’t look like myself — older, harder, I wasn’t sure what else. A shave might have helped to restore me to normal, but I hadn’t brought along the razor Molly had bought me yesterday morning.

  When I turned to the bed, Molly lay flat on her back, staring up at the ceiling. I said good morning. Her gray eyes rolled toward me; she didn’t reply. She seemed far away.

  “I’ve been thinking,” I said, “If I go home, I can’t protect Carol any more than I could before I left. I can do more staying here where I can find out in advance what Moon plans.”

  “You’re asking for death.”

  My fingers knotting my necktie were bloodless. “Maybe I am. Maybe that’s what I want. If I’m dead, they have no reason to bother Carol and Esther.”

  “A hero.” She said it without a sneer.

  “No.” I got into my jacket. “Or I can kill Moon if that’s the only way.”

  “You can’t kill anybody.”

  “I can make myself if I have to.” I looked down at her. “But you’re getting out of here at once. I’ll go downstairs and give you a chance to dress.”

  She pushed her cheek into the pillow and closed her eyes. She seemed too tired to do anything but lie there. I went out.

  On the way to the bathroom I passed the stairhead. Somebody I couldn’t see walked through the downstairs hall. Rufus or Milton or Beezie guarding us? Would I be stopped if I strode boldly, out of the house and got into Molly’s car? I had to know. I descended the stairs. The hall and the sitting room were empty. I turned into the lunchroom.

  Only one person besides Tilly was in the lunchroom, and that was Crooked Nose.

  His head was turned toward the hall doorway. I saw him too late to duck out of sight. His pale-blue eyes lay blankly on me. One shoulder crouched over the counter. His body appeared coiled for sudden action, but there was nothing in his face to show that he knew who I was.

  “Good morning,” Tilly greeted me. Her tone was almost friendly. “We eat breakfast at the counter.”

  Crooked Nose lifted his coffee cup. The back of his head was to me now, but I knew that he watched me through the fly-specked mirror behind the counter. It struck me that he was as much afraid of me as I was of him.

  “I’ll have breakfast later, thanks,” I told Tilly.

  I skirted the wirelegged table and stepped outside and looked back. Crooked Nose held his coffee cup to his mouth. He said something to Tilly which must have been amusing. A couple of her chins quivered.

  Two cars were in front of the building— Molly’s coupe and Crooked Nose’s Plymouth. George Moon’s Chrysler wasn’t here. Had Moon left for Brooklyn already? It was twenty after nine and Carol left for school at twenty to. Had he set out early enough to pick her up as she walked to school?

  Panic swept over me. I strode across the front of the house to the archway over the cinder driveway and turned to the parking lot. The Chrysler was parked off the driveway.

  “Hi, Bert.” Beezie sauntered toward me. He was freshly shaven and sleek in his tweed loafer jacket and a tan shirt open at the throat. That wasn’t an outfit for working on cars.

  “Where’s Moon?” I asked.

  “Sleeping, I guess. Want him for anything?”

  “If I’m going to work here, I’d like to get to work.”

  “Relax pal. We're getting us a vacation till a couple of things are straightened out. We did all we could with the cars that’s here and we’re holding off bringing new ones in.”

  “Why?”

  “What’s the use? We got too many already we can’t do more work on. It’s dangerous having them here in the open.”

  “Why can’t we work on them?” I persisted, “We give them a different paint job and change the seat covers and change their appearance in other ways.”

  “Say, you don’t know the kind of job we do.” Beezie looked up at the second-floor windows. I did too, but there was nothing to be seen. “You’ll see what a good job when we get working again.”

  “When will that be?”

  Beezie shrugged. “The boss gives the answers; He don’t tell us much.”

  “Has it anything to do with that bag they were talking about?”

  “The boss gives the answers.”

  On the other side of the house a motor started. I listened to the car back out to the road and then I saw Crooked Nose pass in his Plymouth. He may or may not have been rushing away because I had seen him.

  I told Beezie I was going in for breakfast. He didn’t tag after me back to the house. Molly’s coupe now had the narrow parking space in front of the building to itself. I got behind the wheel and unlocked the ignition with the key I had borrowed from her yesterday afternoon. The motor turned over sweetly and I kicked the starter. I made the motor roar and waited for somebody to show excitement over the fact that I was driving away. Nobody seemed to give a damn. I cut the ignition and sauntered into the lunchroom.

  Tilly’s head lifted from a tabloid spread out on the counter. “Breakfast?” she asked as if hoping that I wouldn’t bother her.

  “After I wash up.”

  I went upstairs and turned at the stairhead to the bathroom at the end of the hall. A door behind me opened and Rufus came out of his room. He wore unlaced shoes and pants and nothing else. A towel was over one arm and shaving equipment in the other hand.

  “Be in there long, Bert?”

  “Only a minute,” I said.

  Rufus faded back into his room as I pushed open the bathroom door. It opened halfway and then something blocked it. “Anybody in there?” I asked. When there was no answer, I sidled through the opening.

  George Moon’s long body filled the bathroom. He lay on his face with his head under the wash-basin and his legs behind the door. A thin line of blood had trickled from a cut on his temple to the white tile floor, but that wasn’t what had killed him. He must have struck his temple against the basin when he had fallen with a knife in his back. One cheek lay against the floor, and I saw half of his face. A dead face.

  I couldn’t move. My brain jumped to things that didn’t matter at the moment. I studied the bone-handled carving knife between his shoulders and decided that it had come from the lunchroom. He must have been standing at the wash-basin when somebody had entered—somebody he did not fear to let come up behind him. Then he had died quickly, without enough sound for anybody in the house to have noticed particularly. He couldn’t have fallen so precisely along one wall of the bathroom. The killer must have shoved the body into that position so that the door could be opened wide enough for exit.

  A car pulled up beneath the bathroom window. I heard Beezie sing out: “Hi, Ed.”

  The sound of Beezie’s hearty voice roused me. I became aware of the bathroom door still partly open. I slipped out into the hall and closed the door and did n
ot quite run to my room.

  Molly was out of bed. She had shed her pajama top and was opening the waistband button, of the trousers. It was no time for embarrassment. I shut the door behind me and when I looked at her again she had not quite completed turning her back to me.

  “Moon is dead,” I said. “In the bathroom. A knife in his back.”

  She stared at me over one bare shoulder. Her mouth was slack, her eyes almost as lifeless as that one dead eye I had seen in the bathroom.

  “I didn’t kill him,” I said. “I found him less than a minute ago. Don’t stand there. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  She nodded and started to turn to me. Then she remembered and crossed her arms over her breasts. I faced the door. In the hall somebody walked. I gripped the knob, and my split knuckles ached. Rufus had been waiting for his turn in the bathroom. He must have heard me leave.

  “Who did it?” Molly said thinly.

  “Any of them. Maybe even Crooked Nose. He was in the lunchroom a few minutes ago. Moon might have been lying there for a long time, or it happened while I was downstairs. Whoever murdered him won’t have trouble convincing the others we did it. We’re the logical candidates. Can’t you hurry?”

  The steps in the hall returned. Were they coming from the bathroom or from the stairhead? A door opened. Rufus’ door, it seemed — from that end of the hall, anyway. I sought for the key to this door and recalled that there wasn’t one.

  “I think Rufus found him already,” I said and turned.

  She sat in her red wool dress on the edge of the bed. One stocking was drawn halfway up a bare leg. She was frozen now, bent over and holding the rolled stocking around her calf.

  “Are you sure?” she whispered.

  “I think so. Maybe we can get out through the window. It’s quite a drop, but we’ll have to do it. For God’s sake, get that other stocking on before it’s too late!”

  The door flew open. The sharp edge of it caught my head. I stumbled a little and whirled and looked into Rufus Lamb’s gun. His chest was still naked. He said; “Yeah, I heard that. It’s too late, Bert.”