“Now, señor, it is necessary that you talk. Circumstances, you will admit, do not appear favorable for you. Reflect, if you please. Señora MacCauley, with whom you have become estranged over the handsome. Ivan, rouses in the night, for reasons which she declines to divulge, and makes her way to Ivan’s room. The door is open. Very strange. She looks into the room and beholds Ivan on the floor, as we all have seen him. Beyond Ivan, slumped in the open doorway to the terrace, she sees her husband…you, señor. You are sitting there—how shall I say, Señor?”
“You can say drunk. Passed out.”
He smiled gratefully and bobbed his head. “Thank you, señor. Passed out. Señora MacCauley, a lady with a sense of duty, contacts the hotel authorities, who in turn contact the police. So, señor, I arrive. While I speak with Señora MacCauley, Señorita Trent arrives. She arrives, as she confesses with charming frankness, to make a last effort to regain the affection of that Ivan. A most popular fellow, Ivan.”
He paused, wagging his head from side to side in admiration and staring at me with swimming regret and sadness.
“And now, señor, since you are almost certainly guilty of murder, it is time for you to try to convince me otherwise.”
I tried until it hurt, but all the time I had a feeling that I wasn’t doing much good. My head swelled and contracted like a frog’s throat, and my tongue was as thick as a catcher’s mitt. Everything was distorted inside my skull and came out worse. Tellez listened in silence, his placid, olive face assuming an intensifying expression of pain, as if it grieved him sorely to see such a fine, young Americano come to such an evil and floundering end.
“This man you mention…this Señor Smith…although your story sounds incredible, it will do much to give it another face if he corroborates it.” He turned to the slender Mexican with the notebook. “Manuel, you will go at once to room six-sixteen and request Señor Smith’s presence here.”
Manuel went, and we waited. Tellez hummed softly a gay, incongruous air of fiesta. Hannah stood very still by the door. Once her eyes met mine, and the blindness was gone for a second, and there was for that second an expression I had once known well and hadn’t thought to see again. It looked like love.
Eva Trent sat on the arm of a chair. She leaned back in a posture that should have been relaxed, one arm flung out along the top of the back, but the effect was not one of relaxation at all. There was about her an atmosphere of passionate tenseness, and I remembered that she had loved Ivan beyond pride, and that Ivan was dead. She had wanted him back, she said, on any terms, and now there were no terms left by which she or anyone else could ever have him.
* * * *
My head expanded and shrank again and again, and Manuel appeared quietly in the room.
“Pardon, señor,” he said. “There is no response.
Tellez faced him, tapping his white teeth with a polished fingernail.
“The number was six-sixteen?”
“Most certainly!”
“You made the big effort?”
“Enough to wake the dead!”
“Not Señor Ivan, I hope.” Tellez chuckled at his little joke. Then, as if conceding and regretting its poor taste, bit the chuckle off with a snap of the white teeth. “Go at once to the desk and consult the register.”
But by then I knew. I knew even before Manuel returned that Señor Smith was not on the register. Señor Smith had ceased to exist. It was apparent from his attitude as he listened to Manuel’s report that Tellez was convinced that Señor Smith had never existed at all.
“You are sure?” he asked. “He is not registered?”
Manuel shrugged. “The clerk was positive. No one is registered for room six-sixteen. It is empty.”
Tellez turned on me like a sleek cat, purring. “Ah,” he said.
I put the heel of a hand against my forehead and pressed hard, but the throbbing kept right on. My brain still refused to cooperate. I thought of the man I had taken for a waiter at the bar downstairs, the one who had requested most urgently that I come to room six-sixteen. But I didn’t even bother to mention him, because I knew that there would be no such waiter. Only one person would remember my ascent to six, the elevator operator. He would remember, and he would tell, and it would place me very patly at the right place at the right time.
“It happened like I told you,” I said. “I can’t prove it, but that’s the way it happened.”
Tellez looked pained at my foolish tenacity. He lifted his plump arms with a sigh. “Señor, there is much to be said for confession. It cleanses the soul, it predisposes the authorities to leniency.”
“To hell with the authorities,” I said.
His eyes rolled up whitely. After all, what could one do but one’s best? One could do nothing more, obviously, except consign the Americano to the inevitable consequences of his own idiocy.
“Very well, señor. It becomes necessary for me to tell you that you are not to leave the hotel. It is possible, after reflection, that you will arrive at a more sensible attitude.”
On the arm of her chair, Eva Trent moved. Her body came up slowly from its half-reclining position, her dark eyes feverish, bright spots the size of silver dollars burning on the high bones of her cheeks. The feverish eyes were on me, but her voice, an incredulous whisper, was directed to Tellez. “You’re letting him go?”
“No, señorita. I am letting him retire to his room.”
“He’s guilty. He’s guilty as hell.”
“Very possible, señorita. Even very likely. But the case lacks completion. There are the loose ends to gather. In the meantime, he is secure. Believe me, the police of my country are not the children playing a man’s game. It is better that you leave these things in my hands.”
A deep breath fluttered her lips. The whisper came straight my way now, skipping Tellez. “You killed Ivan, and you’ll die for it. Tonight you stood in that hot room and stabbed him from behind because you’re a lousy little man who can’t even hang on to a wife, and if it’s the last thing I do on earth, I’ll see you as dead as he is.”
I looked at her for a moment, feeling sick, and it seemed impossible that anyone could feel like that about a harmless sort of guy who had done nothing worse than write a best-seller.
“Thanks,” I said. “Thanks very much.”
Then, not looking at anyone, I turned and went out and back to my own room. I walked over to the glass doors which were open onto the balcony, and I stood there for a long time, maybe half an hour, feeling the cool air on my face and looking at the improbable stars. They were so close that it seemed I could reach up and rake them down with my fingers. I thought that it would be a satisfactory conclusion to everything if I could reach beyond them to the black velvet sky and pull the whole works down upon a world that had gone both barren and mad. I didn’t even hear Hannah come into the room behind me. I didn’t know she was there until she spoke.
“Carey,” she said.
I turned. Her eyes were no longer blind. They were filled now with a kind of general sorrow for the things that happened and the people they happened to. People like her and me and maybe Ivan.
“Did you kill him, Carey?”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t kill him.”
It must have been the answer she expected, for she accepted it.
“I came to ask you that question, and one other. This is the other one: Do you believe something that seemed bigger than the world, bigger than you or anything that ever happened to you before, could end utterly and finally without warning or reason? No, don’t answer. I only want to tell you that it can. Tonight, when Ivan took me to my room, I thought I would love him forever, and there was no question in my mind, but then, all at once I didn’t love him at all. I stood there on my balcony, and I only knew that I was terribly lonely and needed someone very much, and it was you I needed. It was like waking suddenly from an impossible dream. I kept thinking about things that happened to us, little things and big things, and I knew that I would hav
e to have you back or die. That’s the reason I went to Ivan’s room, to tell him this.”
So the world wasn’t ending, and I wasn’t dying. In that instant, with everything coming alive inside me with the wonderful organic pain of birth, I knew who had killed Ivan. The realization was almost parenthetical, a sudden aside of small recollection tucked into the principal clause of Hannah’s homecoming. I went over to her and put my arms around her, and it was as if she’d never been away.
“Ivan?” I asked. “Who the hell is Ivan?”
It was fine then, there in the room with the cool air coming through the open doors from the Mexican night, and after a while she went to sleep. I waited a little, and then I went out and back up to Eva Trent’s room. I knocked and kept knocking until she opened the door, still in the ice blue robe, and stood looking out at me. I heard her breath catch sharply in her throat.
“You’re good,” I said. “You ought to be on the stage. All that love…all that hate. But now I know you killed Ivan yourself. I know because I remember what you said, and I’d have caught it at the time if I hadn’t been stupid with alcohol. In that hot room, you said, and it wasn’t hot. It wasn’t hot because I opened the windows and let the night air in. But it was hot earlier, when I found him dead. And even earlier than that, when you killed him. Have you decided as yet whether it’s hanging or shooting?”
Then, without sound, the plump little man named Smith was behind her with a gun in his hand.
“Come in, Mr. MacCauley,” he said.
There was no sensible alternative, so I went.
“So that’s how you vanished so easily,” I said. “A simple matter of moving from one room to another.”
He chuckled pleasantly. “These things can always be arranged, just as Ivan’s death was arranged…just as yours will be.” His eyes flicked over to Eva Trent. “I hardly know why I bother, really. Such a stupid mistake, my dear. I’ll have to think of an appropriate penalty.”
I shifted weight, and the gun jerked significantly in his hand.
“You mentioned the border,” I said. “That much, I think, was real. You ought to know, because you direct the operations that run across it, whatever they are. It must be quite an organization, and Ivan wanted out. The poor guy was really gone on Hannah, and he wanted out. So you put him out, very permanently. With me around, a guy discarded, a perfect patsy, the setup was perfect. Just get me in the right area at the right time, and the whole thing took care of itself. With Eva’s help, of course.”
He shrugged. “It’s dangerous to have apostates in an organization like mine. The risk is too great. Ivan understood that. He has only himself to blame.”
It was late. For me, almost too late. Even as he spoke, my muscles were drawing tight, and I drove toward him, clutching for the wrist above the gun. He skipped back and tripped. The blast of the gun was hot on my neck as I fell sprawling. Rolling over, I looked across into the mouth of the gun barrel, and it looked as big as a manhole, and I thought that it was rotten luck to die with Hannah just back. Then there was another blast, but it seemed to come from behind me, from the vicinity of the door. The plump little man who called himself Smith, kneeling on one knee, coughed softly and folded over, settling himself on the floor as if he were trying to find a comfortable position.
From the door, the sonorous voice of Ramon Tellez, Mexican cop, had a tone of gentle reproof. “You should have consulted the authorities, señor. As I said, the police of my country are not children. Did you think we would leave you unobserved?”
After that, there was little or nothing I could do, and pretty soon Tellez shook my hand and said everything would of a certainty be alright, and I went back to my room…mine and Hannah’s. She was still asleep, with her hair spread on the pillow, and there was a warm and aching happiness inside my ribs as I stood for a while looking out at the paling stars.
It’s time to head north, I thought. It’s time to go home.
THE COLLECTOR COMES AFTER PAYDAY
Originally published in Manhunt, August 1953.
CHAPTER 1
Frankie looked through a lot of bars before he found the old man. He was sitting in a booth in a joint on lower Market Street with a dame Frankie didn’t know. They were both sitting on the same side of the booth, and Frankie could see that they were plastered together like a couple of strips of Scotch tape.
“Come on home, Pop,” Frankie said. “You come on home.”
The woman looked up at him, and her lips twisted in a scarlet sneer. The scarlet was smeared on the lips, as if she’d been doing a lot of kissing, and the lips had a kind of bruised and swollen look, as if the kisses had been pretty enthusiastic.
“Go to hell away, sonny,” she said.
She lifted her martini glass by its thin stem and tilted it against her mouth. Frankie reached across the booth in front of the old man and slapped the glass out of her hand. It shivered with a thin, musical sound against the wall, and gin and vermouth splashed down her low-cut dress. The olive bounced on the table and rolled off.
The woman raised up as far as she could in the cramped booth, her eyes hot and smoky with gin and rage.
“You little punk,” she said softly.
Frankie grabbed her by a wrist and twisted the skin around on the bone.
“Leave Pop alone,” he said. “You quit acting like a tramp and leave him alone.”
Then the old man hacked down on Frankie’s arm with the horny edge of his hand. It was like getting hit with a dull hatchet. Frankie’s fingers went numb, dropping away from the woman’s wrist, and he swung sideways with his left hand at the old man’s face. The old man caught the fist in a big palm and gave Frankie a hard shove backward.
“Blow, sonny,” he said.
For a guy not young at all, he was plenty tough. His eyes were like two yellow agates, and his mouth was a thin, cruel trap under a bold nose. From the way his body behaved, it was obvious that he still had good muscular coordination. He was poised, balanced like a trained fighter.
Frankie saw everything in a kind of pink, billowing mist. He moved back up to the booth with his fists clenched, and in spite of everything he could do, tears of fury and frustration spilled out of his eyes and streaked his cheeks.
“You get the hell out of this,” he said. “You ought to be ashamed, drinking and playing around this way.”
The old man slipped out of the booth, quick as a snake, and chopped Frankie in the mouth with a short right that traveled straight as a piston. Frankie hit the floor and rolled over, spitting a tooth and blood. He was crazy. Getting up, he staggered back at the old man, cursing and sobbing and swinging like a girl. This time the old man set him up with a left jab and threw a bomb. Frankie went over backward like a post, his head smacking with a wet, rotten sound.
No one bothered about him. Except to laugh, that is. Lying there on the floor, he could hear the laughter rise and diminish and rise again. It was the final and utter degradation of a guy who’d never had much dignity to start with. Rolling over and struggling up to his hands and knees, he was violently sick, his stomach contracting and expanding in harsh spasms. After a long time, he got the rest of the way to his feet in slow, agonizing stages. His chin and shirt front were foul with blood and spittle.
In the booth, ignoring him, the old man and the woman were in a hot clinch, their mouths adhering in mutual suction. Turning away, Frankie went out. The floor kept tilting up under his feet and then dropping suddenly away. All around him, he could hear the ribald laughter.
CHAPTER 2
It was six blocks to the place where he’d parked his old Plymouth. He walked slowly along the littered, narrow street, hugging the dark buildings, the night air a knife in his lungs. Now and then he stopped to lean against solid brick until the erratic pavement leveled off and held still. Once, at the mouth of an alley, he was sick again, bringing up a thin, bitter fluid into his mouth.
It took him almost an hour to get back to the shabby walkup apartment that was
the best a guy with no luck could manage. In the bathroom he splashed cold water on his face, gasping with pain. The smoky mirror above the lavatory distorted his face, exaggerating the ugliness of smashed, swollen lips drawn back from bloody gums. He patted his face dry with a towel and poured himself a double shot in the living room. He tossed the whisky far back into his mouth beyond his raw lips, gagging and choking from the sudden fiery wash in his throat.
Dropping into a chair, he began to think. Not with any conscious direction. His mind functioned, with everything coming now to a bad end, in a kind of numb and lucid detachment. Suddenly he was strangely indifferent. Nothing had happened, after all, that couldn’t have been anticipated by a guy with no luck whatever.
It was funny the way he was no longer very concerned about anything. Sitting there in the drab living room, in the dull immunity to shame that comes from the ultimate humiliation, he found his mind working itself back at random to the early days at home with the old man. Back to the days when his mother, a beaten nonentity, had been alive. Not a lovable character, the old man. Not easy on wife or kid. A harsh meter of stern discipline for all delinquencies but his own. A master of the deferred-payment technique. In the old days, when Frankie was a kid at home, wrongdoing had never been met with swift and unconsidered punishment that would have been as quickly forgotten. The old man had remarked and remembered. Later, often after Frankie had completely forgotten the adolescent evil he’d committed, there was sure to be something that he wanted very much to do. Then the old man would look at him with skimmed-milk eyes and say, “No. Have you forgotten the offense for which you haven’t paid? For that, you cannot do this thing.”
Wait till it really hurts. That had been the old man’s way.
Remembering, Frankie laughed softly, air hissing with no inflection of humor through the hole where his lost tooth had been. No luck. Never any luck. He’d even been a loser in drawing an old man—a bastard with a memory like an elephant and a perverted set of values.
The Second Fletcher Flora Mystery Megapack Page 8