More Whodunits—The Second Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories
X is for Xmas: Christmas Mysteries
HUNTER AT LARGE, by Thomas B. Dewey
Copyright © 1961 by Thomas B. Dewey.
CHAPTER 1
It was nearly dark when he got home. Driving over the narrow dirt lane, rough as a washboard after the dry spring, Mickey Phillips indulged in some private grumbling. It was a hell of a long way home from downtown, especially after an eighteen-to-twenty-four-hour tour of duty. Nobody else on the force lived out in the damn country like this.
He grumbled some more as he left the car parked on the gravel just outside the run-down, barnlike building they called a garage. It wasn’t usable as a garage, being still jammed with what Mickey had referred to as junk until Kathy set him straight.
“It’s not either junk! It’s genuine, restorable antique furniture. You wait and see.”
His spirits revived when he started along the side path toward the front door. The warm air was sweet with the fragrance of freshly watered grass and shrubbery and the flowers Kathy had coaxed to maturity out of the dry, long-fallow ground. If it was true that nobody on the force lived out in the country, it was also true that nobody else had a Kathy like his. The “farm” was Kathy’s dream and ardent wish, and if Kathy had wanted the moon itself, Mickey would have managed to get himself shot into space with grappling hooks and tow chains.
Luckily, Kathy didn’t care for the moon except as a celestial ornament. All she wanted was Mickey, a house in the country and half a dozen kids, in due time. As he climbed the steps and crossed the worn boards of the old porch, Mickey had a feeling the time to start making the kids was any minute now. The feeling became a certainty when the front door opened and Kathy personally appeared to greet him.
He noticed the new dress at first sight but said nothing until the ritual of homecoming had been accomplished. There was a male prerogative involved. He had a right to lay hands on his wife any time he could get away with it, and he nearly always could. When he finally released her, Kathy was pink, rumpled, short of breath and delighted.
“Well—! Hello, Mr. Detective Second Grade Mickey Phillips.”
“Hello, woman,” he said, closing the door with his heel, tough-guy fashion. “Come closer.”
She held out both hands, backing away.
“Now, Mickey—”
He chased her across the room. She jumped onto the sofa, vaulted over the back and stood panting with it between them. He grinned at her lazily and she let her small tongue protrude pinkly between her white, even teeth. A rank of pin-point freckles marched across her nose, which turned up slightly. She smoothed out the disarranged waves of her luxuriant blue-black hair.
“You noticed!” she said. “How sweet!”
He ogled her ruthlessly. She moved out from behind the sofa warily, removing her apron as she came, smoothed down the sides of her skirt, hitched up the bodice, turned archly this way and that.
“Well,” she said. “You like?”
“Yeah. I like fine. Only where do you plan to wear it?”
“Just a little something for around the house.”
“That’s good,” he said, “because it fits too good, and I mean everywhere.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “There’s room for a girdle—if I decide to wear a girdle.”
“I know, but how do you get it on and off?”
“If you’re a good boy and eat all your spinach, maybe I’ll give you a demonstration.”
Cautiously she edged out from behind the sofa, while he watched with a mock leer. She made a dash for the kitchen and was almost home free, but Mickey got in one good love-swat as she passed.
“Oops!” she gurgled, and she disappeared beyond the swinging door.
Mickey went back to the bedroom to shed his jacket and gun and heavy walking shoes. Getting into a clean, soft shirt, he gazed at the neat, serviceable, king-size bed and grinned happily.
They dined on pot roast with potato pancakes, sweet-and-sour beets, apple pie a la mode and coffee.
Halfway through the meal, Mickey asked, “Where in hell is the spinach?”
“Figure of speech,” Kathy said. “You want to make a complaint, see the manager.”
“I can hardly wait to see the manager—all over.”
“Patience, Master,” she murmured. “We’ve got the whole night—and all the whole day tomorrow!”
Mickey shook his head.
“Afraid not, honey. I have to report back tomorrow.” The brightness in her face turned to indignation.
“It’s your off day! You’ve been on for twenty hours—longer!”
“We’re short,” he said. “Two guys are—sick.”
“Oh no, Mickey!” she wailed, then she broke off, staring at him.
After a moment, she looked away. She knew when he was not exactly lying but glossing over the harsh realities of his profession. The truth was that the two guys were more than sick. One, Sergeant Duffy, was dead; and the second, a detective named Russo, was in critical condition in County Hospital, suffering from deep knife wounds in the neck and abdomen—the result of a savage, unexpected encounter in a warehouse near the railroad yards.
Mickey was lucky (from one personal point of view) to be home at all. He had volunteered for continuing duty, along with everyone else in the house at the time. But he hadn’t been chosen. Captain Andrews had made his selection from among the most experienced men on the force and those who had been on a short tour. The rest he had ordered to follow their regular schedules, except that in Mickey’s case, the usual twenty-four hours off would be cut to twelve.
“We’ve got other business around here, too,” Captain Andrews had said, “so the rest of you had better get your sleep.”
So, he was home on orders, not by choice; but now, being home, he had made up his mind to enjoy it. Kathy pouted for a while but worked out of it all right by the time they finished the pie and ice cream.
“After all,” Mickey said, “you were half right. We’ve got the whole night.”
“Then let’s make the best of it,” Kathy said, getting up and bustling about the table. “I’ll get the dishes done right away.”
“I’ll help.”
“No, honey.” She pushed him toward the big leather chair beside the radio. “You sit down and relax. The Cubs are in St. Louis tonight.”
“All right, I’ll sit down, but between you and the Cubs, I won’t do much relaxing.”
She kissed him quickly and turned back to the table.
“I didn’t mean you should relax altogether,” she said.
He settled back as she carried an armload of dishes to the kitchen. He turned on the radio and monkeyed with the dial till he found the game in St. Louis. It turned out to be a slow pitchers’ duel and he only half listened. Preoccupied with what had happened to Sergeant Duffy and poor Russo, he brooded savagely. He could not have told her the score, in the third inning, when Kathy came in from the kitchen, rubbing lotion into her hands.
She stopped short at the sight of his clenched fists on the chair arms and the way his toes were turned in and raised off the floor, and the look on his face, twisted and full of fury.
He cleared his mind by sheer force, made his hands loosen, planted his feet firmly and smiled. But he didn’t fool Kathy. She settled herself on his lap and kissed his eyes and mouth.
“You’ll get your chance, darling,” she said.
“Sure.”
She placed the tip of her finger against his nose and tapped with it to make her points.
“I know you will,” she said, “because in the first place, you are not an ordinary cop; you are Mickey Phillips. In the second place, you are the smartest cop in the world.”
Her finger slid up along the bridge of his nose. She traced the curving line of his full black brows, first one, then the other. Her hand went up and her fingers lingered over his thick, close-cropped black hair.
“Y
ou’re smart enough,” she said, “to do it the right way, so you won’t get hurt, huh? You have a nice dreamy face and I don’t want to see it messed up.”
“I’ll wear some kind of football headgear. How about that?”
“I don’t care how you do it, honey, but take care of yourself. So you can take care of me. And the kids.”
She was rubbing her nose against his.
“What kids?” he mumbled.
“You know what kids.”
Her mouth found his and her tongue slid slyly, flirtatiously between his teeth. He nipped at it lightly. Kathy wriggled.
“Hey,” she said softly.
“Yeah. About those kids.”
“Do you think I’ll make a good mother?”
“How can I tell without a little inspection?”
“Oh, already you’re an inspector!”
“You know it. How about that demonstration?”
“What demonstration?”
He tightened his arms around her waist. Kathy gasped.
“Ooh, muscles!”
“I got all kinds of muscles. Come on, make with the show.”
“Squeeze me again.”
He did it. She started kicking and he released her and she got off his lap.
“You’ll have to come in the boodwah,” she said, walking away, her hands plucking at the sides of her skirt. “I’m not going to do a strip tease in the living room with the shades up.”
He got up and went after her and there was no more hate in his face. He was halfway across the room when Kathy disappeared in the dark bedroom hall. He changed direction suddenly, went to the door and made sure the night latch was thrown. Unexpected visitors were few and far between out here but they did have this one nosy neighbor, Mrs. Crale, who lived with a bunch of cats about a quarter mile down the road and sometimes got lonely for human companionship.
When he got to the open bedroom door, the light was on and Kathy was standing in the middle of the room with her back to him, her fingers teasing at the dress. He caught her eye, and most of the rest of her, in the mirror above the bureau and smiled. It was supposed to be a wolfish smile.
But what Mickey Phillips was really thinking was, How did it happen to me? A girl like her, out of all the guys she could have had, how come me?
They had been married for nearly two years and he still had this feeling of amazement on the average of three times a day.
She looked at him over her shoulder and he could tell she was excited by the rising pink in her face.
Kathy, he thought. So sweet, so hot, so good—my Kathy.
“You see, about this dress,” she chattered, “it’s simple. There’s a zipper, for instance, right here.”
Her fingers fumbled a little beside her right breast, found the zipper and pulled it down to her waist. She ran her tongue over her lips and looked at him coyly.
“Very clever,” he said. “So then?”
“So what?”
“So what do you do next? Slip out through the slit in the side?”
“No, silly. You have to pick it up by the hem and pull it off. Over the head like.”
“So go ahead.”
She pursed her lips at him and her eyes went wide.
“Oh sir! Must I?”
He took a step into the room.
“You wouldn’t want that nice new dress to get mussed up, would you?” he said.
“Okay, okay,” she said hastily. “Here goes.”
She gathered it up below and began slowly to raise it with both hands. Halfway up the backs of her firm, round thighs, it halted.
“Made it myself, you know,” she said. “Not counting the labor, it cost three dollars and thirty-eight cents.”
“Beautiful Kathy,” he said.
She sighed.
“I don’t know,” she said. “A girl can work her fingers to the bone, right to the bone!”
“I’m bleeding,” he said.
She twisted her body, trying to look down at her naked legs.
“Are my seams straight?” she asked.
“I can’t tell yet.”
She lifted the dress a little higher.
“Got to go a lot higher than that, baby,” he said. “At least a couple of feet.”
“Oh you brute. You big, masterful hunk of muscle.” She raised the hem, up and up, and he watched with rising, thudding excitement as she unveiled the lovely, firm, sparsely freckled flesh, the swelling roundnesses above her thighs, the straight back, small at the waist then broadening, wedge-like, to her rounding, feminine shoulders. She bent slightly and pulled the dress off over her head, then straightened and stood quietly, her eyes fallen, holding the dress in one hand at her side. His throat ached at the perfection of her always new, always breath-taking loveliness.
My Kathy, he thought again; out of all those other guys she could have picked…
He touched her shoulders with tenderness. She was shy for a moment and hid her face on his chest. He drew her toward the bed, sat down on the edge and held her lightly at the hips, kissed the tips of her high, taut breasts. She shivered and ran her hand over his hair.
“Ah, Kathy—” he said.
“You were saying?” she said. “About kids? Babies, like?”
“Uh-huh. Which will it be? Boy or girl?”
“A boy first, I think. Can you do that?”
“Easy as flipping a coin.”
“Yeah,” she said on her breath. “And more fun.”
“Much more fun.”
Standing before him, she started to unbutton his shirt. He filled his arms with the warm fullness of her thighs and buttocks and nuzzled her midriff roughly. There was a knock at the door.
Kathy’s hand tightened in his hair.
“Wait!” she whispered. “Maybe they’ll go away.”
He waited, hugging her. The knock came again, louder. Mickey groaned.
“Probably Old Lady Crale,” he said. “I’ll get rid of her, tell her you’re sick.”
Kathy caught his arm.
“No, don’t tell her that. She’ll be back in fifteen minutes with a bowl of hot soup.”
“I’ll think of something. Don’t go away.”
The knock sounded once more, insistent, when he got to the hall.
“I’m coming,” he growled. “Keep your shirtwaist on.”
He crossed the room quickly, grasped and twisted the door knob and opened wide. The hair at the back of his scalp bristled. Two men stood outside at the threshold: one tall, well built, wearing a gray felt hat; the other stocky, older, in thick glasses, with a bonnet of some kind on his head—a French beret.
“Mickey Phillips live here?” the tall one said.
“What about it?” Mickey said.
The stocky one pulled a white card from his breast pocket and held it out. As Mickey’s eyes dropped to it, the tall one took one step inside and slammed his fist into Mickey’s belly. He doubled downward in sudden agony but held on long enough to swing once at the other’s head. But he was off balance, the blow glanced off a hard cheekbone and the tall one hit him again in the belly.
Mickey sagged. He saw the hand go up and the sap start down, and he tried to dodge, but it struck him on the neck, choking off his wind. It rose and fell twice more, landing once on the top of his head and once behind his right ear. He tried to yell something at Kathy, but afterward he never was sure whether he had made any sound. He collapsed at the tall one’s feet and by the time he hit the floor he was unconscious.
* * * *
He woke to a nightmare of horror beside which all the atrocities he had ever seen or heard about seemed like acts of benevolence. His head throbbed cruelly where the sap had struck it. His vision was distorted and he saw at first through a red haze. He had been gagged so tightly that his cheeks bulged and the nylon stocking they had knotted at the back of his neck drew his lower jaw down and cut harshly into the stretched edges of his mouth. He had been handcuffed behind and strung up by his linked wrists—probably, he th
ought, by means of a rope thrown over one of the old ceiling beams. He was in a sort of partial suspension, hunched forward, with only the balls of his feet on the floor. The reverse twist of his arms threw his dragging weight full on his shoulder sockets.
But none of this was part of the atrocity. That was on the floor before his very eyes and its victim was—
Kathy!…
He screamed it soundlessly in his throat and choked on the gag. He wrenched toward, trying to free himself by sheer force, and the pain in his shoulders nearly drove him senseless. It would have been a blessing, but he fought against it and won. He squeezed his eyes shut, momentarily convinced it was all a dream and he could wake himself from it. But when he looked again it was still going on, incredibly, brutally, with a kind of horrible deliberateness, as in some monstrous dissecting room.
Kathy! His beloved Kathy!
His mind refused at first to accept the evidence of his own eyes. But in the end he had to believe, with the fragment of his mind that still clung to reality. Its monstrousness robbed the evidence of all reason, but his eyes saw and his flesh crawled and all of him knew the truth, reasonable or not.
The two fiends, the sudden, unknown marauders, were methodical and silent, except that the tall one, the younger of the pair, emitted from time to time a low, throaty chuckle. He was sweating lightly and his mouth was spasmodically mobile. He breathed irregularly, as in excitement, and this and the periodic eruption of his gross chuckle showed that he got some satisfaction from his work. What he worked with was a straight razor, such as barbers use.
The other, the stocky, paunchy one in the beret, was impassive. Sometimes the light, reflecting from his thick-lensed glasses, gave him eyes like diamonds, cold-white and glistening, a devil’s mask. He kept lighting cigarettes.
Mickey had no idea how long it had been going on. But he could see, in one dreadful, endless, too-soon-ended moment, that if it weren’t stopped at once, it would be too late. Kathy’s eyes had found his. They were wide, straining to reach him, engorged. All of her was in them and he could read the message plainly, the agonized, mute appeal he was powerless to answer.
Rage filled his throat. On the rim of his vision he saw the razor lift and hover. In a final, desperate lunge, he threw himself against the ruthless torque of his binding. He broke both arms and one wrist and tore the ligaments of his shoulder muscles as if they had been strips of paper. Then he fainted, and in that moment Kathy died.
The Noir Novel Page 2