Bruno Fischer

by J. Max Gilbert

“Anyway, we won’t die of thirst,” Molly said in a voice which struggled to be flippant.

  She had pressed herself into a corner to avoid being struck by my body as it hurtled down. Moonlight slanting through the opening above covered her mellowly. The water reached her waist, and her wet wool dress was plastered to her splendid body. Her mouth was twisted into a grimace which was supposed to represent a smile at the grim joke she had just made, but she was breathing hard and shivering.

  I squirmed to my feet. Directly overhead faces hung under a cloudless sky. They were without individuality, as blurred as if seen through tears. One of the faces spoke in Rufus Lamb’s voice. “When you’re ready to sing, we’ll hear you.”

  The faces pulled away. I glimpsed legs and then light was blocked out as if by a shutter closing. Darkness as complete as in that other hole closed in on us with-the banging of the trap door.

  Outside Tilly said: “Beezie, you and Ed go down and turn on the pump. And stay there. I don’t want the house and lot left alone.”

  Water swished gently in the hole. Molly’s shoulder touched my upper arm. With our wrists tied behind us, we could riot hold each other. Even that small comfort was denied us. We could only stand face to face and press our soaked bodies together.

  “The cold, honey.” Her breath was on my wet cheek as she spoke. “I won’t be able to stand long.”

  “Let’s find a wall to lean against.” We moved together through water.

  A wall stopped us. Face to face, we stood against it. Snatches of muttered conversation from the outside world drifted in, but what they said could not be important to us. They could do no more to us than they were doing, and they would do no less. The side of Molly’s face rested on my shoulder and I felt her mouth on my neck. God, how I wanted to touch her with my hands!

  Abruptly water gushed down on our heads. The pump had been turned on and we were standing under the inlet pipe. That was the ultimate indignity. Fresh from the well, the water was a shower of ice. It beat us down, tore us apart. I hit against another wall and realized that I had lost Molly.

  “Are you all right, Molly?”

  The blackness laughed brokenly, not quite sanely. “I’m wonderful. The only thing that bothers me is that I’m slightly wet.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Here. I’ll always be close to you, honey. They’ll even bury us together.” Blindly I waded. There could not be many feet between us anywhere in that small hole. My body found hers. I- felt her sag. Her chin dug into my chest.

  “Don’t let yourself go to pieces,” I said.

  She started to laugh again and chopped it off at the first gasp. I felt her straighten against me. “Why not go to pieces?” she said. “What difference will it make?”

  “None maybe, except that it’ll make it harder for the one who’s left.”

  “I guess so,” she said emptily.

  A wall was a step away. We leaned against it and listened to water from the inlet pipe striking water in the reservoir. Little waves rippled about my hips and now and then drops splashed into my face. Very close I heard a weird clicking sound. For a while I wondered about it before I recognized it as Molly’s teeth chattering. My own teeth were locked on my lower lip.

  “Honey, they say drowning is an easy death,” she said. “Not like dying of thirst.”

  “That’s consoling.”

  “It’s waiting like this that’s so terrible. We don’t have to torture ourselves. I’m going under.”

  “No!”

  “Why not? All I have to do is let myself go. Why not, Adam?”

  “For God’s sake, Molly, wait!”

  “Wait for what? For the water to reach up for me? Rufus said it would take a few hours. I couldn’t stand on my feet that long, anyway. But why should I stand and wait. Why?”

  There was no answer that made sense, but a dying man does not ask for sense. He wants only to cling to life, beyond hope, beyond reason.

  “Maybe they’ll change their minds and let us out,” I said.

  “You’re kidding yourself, honey. I 'don’t mind dying. I’ve nothing to live for.”

  “Goddamn it, I have!”

  “I know,” she said quietly, sadly. “Your wife, your daughter, your two children who’ll never be born now. I’m sorry I got you into this.”

  “Don’t talk like that. It was my own idea.”

  “No.” She dug her shivering body into mine. “Kiss me, honey.”

  “Don’t let go.”

  “Not for a while yet. Kiss me.”

  I dipped my head and all at once I could see her face. Our lips did not quite touch. A flashlight beam angled down from the trap door.

  “They’re still on their feet,” Rufus said. Then he spoke to us. “How do you like it down there?”

  I waded to a spot under the trap door. “I haven’t got it!” I yelled up at him. “I haven’t, I haven’t, I haven’t! Can’t you understand, I haven’t, got it?” The flashlight went out. I could see Rufus now. Moonlight showed him squatting at the side of the trap door opening. He faced somebody who was not on the roof.

  “We’re up the wrong alley,” he said. “A mummy would talk.”

  “He’s got to have it,” Tilly’s voice replied savagely.

  “One will get you fifty he ain’t. What’s he got to lose by talking now? He ain’t even tried to make a deal.” There was a silence. Rufus looked off to his left and tugged at his long jaw. Then Tilly said: “Close that trap door.”

  “What’ll that get us except we’ll have to clean out the reservoir after we fish them out?” Rufus protested.

  “So we’ll clean it out. He’s figuring we’ll get soft at the last minute.”

  “Nuts! A mummy we put down there would talk.”

  “What do you suggest, that we let them go?”

  “We sure can’t do that.” Rufus’ face turned down to me. “Here it goes, pal. Anything you want to say first?”

  My chin sank to my chest. Darkness returned with a crash. I had had my last look at anything I would ever see. My legs were dragging weights as I waded back to where I had left Molly.

  My body touched a wall. She wasn’t there. I moved along the wall and reached a corner, and still she wasn’t there.

  “Molly!” I screamed. “For God’s sake, Molly!”

  The blackness said quietly: “I’m here.”

  I had gone to the wrong wall. I found her leaning against another wall and pressed myself against her.

  “I wouldn’t go down without telling you first.” Her lips fluttered against mine. “Did you notice how high the water is?”

  “It feels higher.”

  “It’s reached my breasts. And my legs are so tired and numb. Even if I wanted to wait to the end I couldn’t.”

  “Wait a little longer.”

  She laughed, but with little hysteria now. “For Rufus to rescue us? If he does, honey, it’ll be to take us out and shoot us so that our corpses won’t spoil the water supply.”

  “Wait,” I said.

  “I’ll try, honey.”

  Time was measured by the rising of the water level. Molly was very quiet now. We would die well, I knew, which meant that we would not make too much fuss. The noisy deaths were for the sound effect of radio shows. I had seen enough of death in bombed cities and just behind the front; and to soldiers and civilians alike it came not with a bang or a whimper, but in the end with weary acceptance. It would come softly to us, like falling asleep. Very soon now I would suddenly be aware that she no longer stood against me. There would be nothing for me to wait for then. I would simply fold my knees and breathe the water into my lungs.

  “What’s that?” Molly said hoarsely.

  I awoke as if from a drugged dream. The voices outside were louder than they had been before.

  “Probably Tilly and Rufus arguing,” I muttered indifferently.

  “No, listen.” Her cheek moved away from the side of my jaw.

  “There’s the trap door!”
somebody outside exclaimed. “Hurry!” And feet thumped on the roof.

  Molly stiffened against me. I tilted my head. The trap door started to lift. I watched a patch of sky appear, and then a light blinded me.

  “They’re alive!” a man shouted.

  The light left my eyes and lay on the water. Another light stabbed out from somewhere off the road and momentarily illuminated a face hovering above us.

  It was a face with a twisted nose and a deeply cleft chin.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I was awakened for breakfast. I looked at the small creamy-tan room and at the nurse who was wheeling a bed tray toward my chest. A window on my left framed a grassy slope falling sharply away into morning mist and rising distantly on the other side of the valley.

  “Is this Badmont?” I asked the nurse.

  “Well, of course. Don’t you remember being brought here?”

  I remembered that I had sat huddled in the back seat of a sedan. My soaked outer clothing had been on the floor at my feet and a couple of coarse but snug blankets had covered me to my chin. Molly had been in another police car right behind us. All the way there Lieutenant Batterman, who was mostly belly and jowls, had prodded me into talking when what I had wanted was sleep. And sleep had won out over the lieutenant before we had reached our destination. I remembered now having been put to bed somewhere, but I hadn’t known where or by whom and hadn’t cared. The bed had been the important thing.

  It still was. I yawned mightily. “What’s wrong with me?”

  “Nothing that food and rest won’t cure. Eat your breakfast.”

  My eyes refused to remain open. Between orange juice and a soft-boiled egg I dozed off. The nurse shook me.

  “A phone,” I muttered. “Got to call my wife.”

  “You must eat first, Mr. Breen.”

  I fell asleep again over the coffee. When I awoke, the tray was gone and I was alone in the room. My eyelids were heavy and my head dull and there was a gnawing emptiness in my stomach, but I had felt worse the morning after a late party. I rang for the nurse. The same one came in. She was a matronly woman in her fifties who looked like a magazine drawing of somebody’s mother.

  “I’m starved,” I said.

  “It’s twenty to twelve. Can you wait till twelve?”

  “If I have to,” I said. “What I want most is a phone. I have to call my wife,”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Breen, but we have no phone attachments in the rooms. We’re not like the big city hospitals. We have only ten beds.”

  “There must be a phone somewhere in the hospital.”

  “I’m sorry, but you can’t leave your bed till Dr. Cadmar examines you.”

  “Well, why the hell doesn’t he examine me?”

  She said patiently: “Dr. Cadmar has been called away. He’ll be back soon.”

  As soon as she left the room, I slipped out of bed and went1 to the tiny corner closet. I didn’t expect to find my water-ruined clothes, but I hoped there would be a robe to wear over my ridiculous cotton nightgown. There wasn’t. The door started to open. I scurried back to the bed like a small boy who heard a parent approach his room. I had the cover over me when Crooked Nose entered.

  “How are you?” His pale-blue eyes were, after all, capable of expression. They were mildly friendly now.

  “Good enough,” I said, “Will you do me a favor? Phone my wife and tell her I’m all right.”

  “A little while ago the Crane girl spoke to her. I met her in the hall and we looked in on you and saw you were asleep. She said your wife ought to know you were safe and sound. She called her up from the booth.”

  “She’s swell,” I said. “How is she?”

  “Up and about, like I said. That’s the way women are, more resilient than men.” He sat on the chair beside my bed and crossed his legs and pulled out cigarettes and offered me one. “Swell looker,” Crooked Nose said. “What do you know about her?”

  “Molly ? “ The smoke felt good inside me. “Last night you told me your name, but I’ve forgotten it.”

  “Booth Mawrey.”'

  “You’re a detective, you told me.”

  “Private.” He rolled the tip of his cigarette on his lips. “Why don’t you want to talk about Molly Crane?”

  “She writes. She came with me to get a story.”

  “What does she write for, a magazine or a paper?”

  I said carefully: “I think she freelances, sells her stuff to any editor who wants it. But I’m not sure. Why don’t you ask her if you want to know?”

  Booth Mawrey twitched his twisted nose and went to the dresser for an ashtray.

  “A private detective,” I said, “Who hired you?”

  “A group of insurance companies.” He brought the ashtray to the chair. “They don’t like to pay out money for stolen cars, and the official police weren’t getting anywhere. Moon was suspected of being kingpin, but he was too smart and had too much political influence. I spent a whole month just trying to get a line on members of his organization. That’s how I come to you. One of Moon’s top men, Raymond Teacher, got hit by a car and a woman named Mrs. Breen drove him to the hospital. Probably no connection, but my job consists of chasing a hundred tangents in the hope that one will lead somewhere. Right off I found out that Mrs. Breen’s husband worked for a car dealer.”

  “That also impressed Jasper Vital and Larry Goodby.”

  “Sure. They didn’t know the setup in Brooklyn, so they saw the same possibility I did. Redfern Motors could be an outlet for hot cars. In stories there’s a lot of blood and thunder connected with the detective business. Don’t kid yourself. It means hanging around a house for hours or days and waiting for a break that mostly doesn’t come. I thought I had one when a swanky heap pulled up to your house and a couple of guys paid you a visit. One of them — I didn’t know then he was Larry Goodby — was a mug if I ever saw one. So when you and the mug came out, there I was right behind you.”

  I said dryly: “Lieutenant Woodfinch thought I’d made up Larry to alibi myself. You could have told him Larry existed and that I’d knocked him out.”

  “I had a job to peddle my own papers,” Booth Mawrey smiled bleakly. “Telling the police or the DA’s office anything was the same as telling Moon. I was keeping myself under wraps. Of course, I’d have spoken up if they were ready to burn you, but they weren’t up to that.”

  “I shouldn’t complain. You saved my life last night.”

  He brushed that aside with a wave of his hand. “Sheer accident. A guy like me has to have connections. I picked up word about a car lot near Badmont. As soon as I got there, I spotted the setup.”

  “It couldn’t be missed once you knew, that they were in the stolen car racket.”

  “Sure, if you were looking for it. But that was one sweet location, just inside the state and forty miles from the nearest New York town of any size. There wasn’t much in that sparsely populated area to take the New York State police so close to the state line, and at the same time the car lot wasn’t so isolated that it would look phoney. For practical purposes it was right outside a town — Badmont. But the Badmont law, what there is of it, has no jurisdiction there, and the same goes for the New Jersey State police, and where there’s no jurisdiction there’s no interest. You know the blind spot every eye has, where the muscles meet. That car lot was in the blind spot of the police eye. And the gang had sense enough not to steal New York or New Jersey cars.”

  “They ran them up from Florida,” I said.

  “From a number of resort places, though a lot came from the Florida east coast, from Daytona Beach to Miami. I’ve known that for weeks. In winter Florida is flooded with cars, from every state in the union. They’d swipe a car and run it up over state lines all the way to Badmont, changing the license plate every few hours. Some of them were nabbed on the way, but not many. Out-of-state cars are no novelty going south or north along the east coast during the winter, and hot cars, came from so many different states that the
local cops were balled up. How effectively they worked it is proved by the fact that they got away with it for a couple of years at least.”

  “Jasper Vital headed the Florida end of the job.”

  “That was no secret to me,” Mawrey said. “I’d never seen him, but I’d heard of him when I was getting a line on Moon’s organization. I also heard that he figured Moon was taking too large , a share of the profits and had come north with blood in his eye. Well, like I said, I got to the car lot and knew what was what, but proving it was something else.”

  “I saw you looking at cars with a fountain pen flash.”

  “Was that you who chased me?” He burst into laughter when I nodded. “Boy, that’s rich! I saw somebody coming and did I scoot. I was having a look at Chryslers, which have the serial numbers on the door frames. I was trying to match the numbers I found with a list of numbers of recently stolen cars.”

  “Did they match?”

  “No. Moon and his gang did a wonderful job on the hot cars. When trying to find evidence that way got me nowhere, I saw my one chance was a police raid and then an examination and checkup of every car there. So yesterday I went to the New York State police zone headquarters and laid what I had on the table. It was good enough for me, but not for Lieutenant Batterman. He couldn’t pull a raid on the say-so of a shamus without a single thing to back it up. But I had a card up my sleeve. I’d seen you there that morning, and the Brooklyn cops wanted you.”

  “So the one honest man in the place was the excuse for the raid?”

  Mawrey grinned. “That’s the way it turned out. I didn’t know you were honest. To me you were a reason for the cops to move in. Batterman phoned Woodfinch and Woodfinch said you'd either been kidnaped and were held there against your will or you were a material murder witness who’d taken a powder. That was good enough. It was night by then. We waited a few hours longer to be sure everybody would be in that was going to be in. Lucky for you and the Crane girl we didn’t delay it more than that.”

  “Very lucky. How did you know what was happening at the reservoir?”

  “For a few minutes the raid looked only half successful. I’d hoped that we would nab Moon himself with the evidence. We caught only two of them, Ed Weaver and Beezie Jones, if that’s his real name. Weaver clammed up, but the kid went to pieces when he saw uniforms and he talked enough to make us scoot up the hill. We skirted around to the other side of the hill and up through the woods there and swarmed over Tilly Ames and Rufus Lamb and Milton Curry. And here you are.”