The Walt Whitman MEGAPACK ™

by Millard, Joseph J.

  Unfazed, Anderson said, “I want to tell you that I think you rate a sergeantcy. You’ve got the guts and brains and—”

  “Brains?” said Childers, arching oil-smeared brows in surprise. “Look, Lieutenant, I cracked up this bloody mess—okay. But I did it by following one wrong hunch after another. Can I help it if the little Cockleburr here made them all turn out right?”

  DEAD WRONG, by Lucille Cali

  Originally published in Hardboiled, January, 2009.

  “I just want the bitch dead…I don’t give a damn if you shoot, stab or strangle her, that’s up to you, you know, whatever floats your boat. I would like her to suffer, the way she’s made me suffer. But that’s me, I understand if you want it to be quick. I just ain’t gonna give some money hungry twat half of everything that I worked so hard to get. I’m not doing it…besides; I’ve already got my eye on this tight piece of ass at work. I’m working on it; you know how that goes? Still, this bitch has morals and won’t let me hit it while I’m married. Do you know how hard it is to see that shit shaking in front of me everyday and not being able to hit it? And you can believe me; I am going to hit that! So I just need you to take care of this little matter for me as soon as possible and I will take care of you, like we agreed. You know, you’re costing me a hell of a lot less than she would have, a hell of a lot less!”

  There was total silence in Detective Buff’s office as he stopped the tape recorder. Maria Colletti was in tears.

  “So you can see for yourself,” he told her, “your husband has hired one of our undercover detectives to facilitate your murder. This is not a joke, he is dead serious, and if you don’t wake up soon you are going to be dead. Sooner or later, he will find someone to do it, or maybe he’ll get desperate enough to do it himself. Either way, you have a target on your head.”

  “Detective,” she said, “there must be some misunderstanding.”

  “Are you deaf? There is no misunderstanding, you heard it for yourself in his own words.”

  “My Eddie would never do anything like this,” she said almost proudly. “He’s such a good husband. We love each other dearly. This recording, it doesn’t even sound like him.”

  “Well, you’re wrong,” Buff pleaded.

  Maria just shook her head in disbelief.

  Detective Nicholas Buff had it with trying to convince stubborn fools like Maria Colletti exactly how bad their loving spouses were. Everyday he sees the bumps, bruises and broken noses, and everyday he hears the same lame excuses. ‘He’s misunderstood’, ‘His mother abused him’, or even ‘It was my fault, I deserved it.’ It’s like he was beating his head against the wall. He couldn’t understand why these women protected their abusers. Meanwhile, why did his own wife find it so easy to leave him? He’d never even raised his hands to her. Even after he found out about the affair, he wanted to make things right, but she still left. That really bothered him.

  “Listen lady, if you make us release your husband tonight and you go home with him, you’re risking your life. I can’t force you to bring charges against him. I think the District Attorney’s Office might still pursue this. In either case I think you should talk to a family member, or someone else you trust before you post bail for this maniac. Here’s my card and call if you need me, but please think about what you are doing!”

  Maria stood up, wiped her eyes, straightened her suit jacket and said, “I appreciate your concern detective, however I think it is fair to say that I know my husband better than you, or the District Attorney. I don’t have to think about whether or not I want to go home with my husband. Now, I have given you a bonded check, please give me my husband.”

  “You got it,” was all he said.

  * * * *

  “Piece of shit assholes! They had me in a cell with rapists and murders. What the hell took you so long to make bail?” Edward Colletti was pissed; and he didn’t even think to hide that fact. “It’s not like we don’t have the money.” He continued. “If I were a pair of shoes on sale at the mall, I’d be in your God damn closet already.”

  “I’m sorry Eddie” Maria said as she began to cry again. “They held me up, I tried to get you out sooner.”

  “Wait one minute,” he barked, “don’t tell me you believe these assholes!”

  “Oh no Eddie, never!” she cried.

  Eddie grabbed her by her shoulders and yelled “Maria, you look me right in my eyes and tell me you don’t believe them!”

  “Let her go. Come on buddy, ease off.” Detective Buff touched Eddies arm. “Do you want me to take you back inside? Take your hands off her and lower your voice.”

  “Come on honey, let’s go home,” Maria urged.

  Eddie grabbed her by the hand and they walked out of the police station together.

  * * * *

  Later that night Maria prepared a beautiful dinner for Eddie. After such a stressful day, she sent him off to take a nice long hot bath while she got everything ready.

  “Are we ready to eat yet?” Eddie yelled from his easy chair.

  “Almost, baby doll!” was her reply. She loved to cook for Eddie, and he loved his dessert, which she was preparing ahead.

  “What the hell is taking so long? I’m starving.”

  “Give me a minute, sweetheart,” she said, and she was good to her word, within one minute dinner was served! Handmade manicotti followed by chicken cutlet parmigana, mashed potatoes and a big salad. Maria was a good cook, and a good wife. “How is everything baby?” she inquired.

  “OK” he said as he inhaled everything like a vacuum cleaner.

  “Why don’t you go watch TV while I clean up. Then we’ll have dessert!”

  * * * *

  Eddie began to watch ‘Americas Most Wanted’. There was a story on about a guy whose wife had an accident in the bathtub. The guy claimed he went out and when he returned home found the door was locked, and he didn’t have his key with him. When his wife wouldn’t answer the door he got a neighbor to help him “break in”. He checked the bedroom; his neighbor checked the bathroom. It was the neighbor who found her, dead in the tub. The show told how the guy got away with it for 25 years, until his next wife also had an accident in the tub! Eddie began to think about it. There could be lots of household accidents, bathtub, the pool, garage, why even those basement steps were dangerous!

  “Honey, here’s your dessert!” Maria presented Eddie with a beautiful bowl of berries, tossed in sugar with a touch of lemon and covered in home made whipped cream.

  “That’s it, no damn Jell-O?” he complained.

  “Sorry doll, we ran out, I’ll make it tomorrow,” she promised.

  He really didn’t hear her. He was still thinking about those basement steps. Wait, maybe the back porch steps, that would make it easy for a neighbor to find her. But that might make it likely he would be seen tossing her down them, knowing his nosey neighbors. No, the more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea of the basement steps. He could lure her over to the door, push her down the stairs, crack her head, crack it a little more, if necessary, then close the door and claim that he was out and didn’t know where his little pumpkin bitch had gone!

  Eddie smiled for the first time since that rat cop ruined his plans, now he had a new plan and he was happy.

  * * * *

  Eddie decided that he would put his plan into action right away. Then he would have all night to clean, tie up any loose ends and set up his alibi. He figured that he would tell the cops, after they found her of course, that Maria decided that they should spend a few nights away from each other, to allow them to clear their heads and that he never heard from her again.

  How could they prove otherwise? He was a genius.

  Eddie only wished that he had thought of this before involving a third party, but actually, this made perfect sense to him, a
nd he giggled at the thought. It was a beautiful thing, and he was still on schedule with little miss tight ass! Imagine how sorry she would feel for him, losing his wife in such a horrible accident… This will certainly expedite his access to that sweet thing! He almost came in his pajamas just thinking about it. Almost, because he suddenly felt dizzy as he stood up. Must have gotten up too fast, and he almost fell over. Almost, because Maria was right there to catch him.

  “What’s the matter baby doll?” she asked?

  “Must be your lousy cooking, made me queasy, I feel sick.”

  “Maybe you should lie down,” and with that she hit him with a bolt of electricity from a taser gun. She didn’t know how many volts of electricity shocked his already compromised body but he fell down like a sack of potatoes. Only potatoes don’t yelp like Eddie did.

  “What the hell are you doing you bitch!” he screamed.

  “What the hell am I doing? What the hell were you doing? Did you really think that I could be that stupid? That I could love you so much that I couldn’t see you wanted me dead? Nobody could be that damn stupid, except maybe you!”

  “You bitch, you’ll never get away with this! They’ll hang you, nail you to the damn wall for it.” Eddie was in agony, so much so that he could hardly speak any longer; good thing he only need to listen…

  “That’s the best part my dear. As soon as I heard about your plot to have me killed I knew what I had to do, but it was only when you said on that tape that you didn’t want to give me half of everything, that it suddenly dawned on me that you would be giving me everything; even my alibi. You see dear in a few minutes you are going to pass out from the sleeping pills I put in your dinner. Then I am going to shoot you with this gun. I bought it for protection I’m going to say. Then I am going to call Detective Buff, he gave me his card in case I needed it. I will be in tears of course and I’ll tell him all about the beautiful evening that I planned. I’ll tell him about the dinner and dessert I made and then I’ll break down when I tell him that he was right about you after all. I’ll tell him that you tried to drown me it the bathtub after watching that story on America’s Most Wanted. I broke away by luck, and made it downstairs where I found my gun, then shot you in self-defense.”

  “They’ll never…believe you…” Eddie choked.

  “Oh, they’ll believe me, my dear, because the best lie is one that is closest to the truth. Everything supports my story, right down to the freaking bath water you so considerately left for me to drain. You’re the one that’ll end up dead now—not me.”

  Eddie gasped.

  “Not quite as you planned, darling. You were so wrong, and soon you’ll just be dead wrong.”

  GRIM REAPER’S HANDICAP, by Fergus Truslow

  Originally published in 10-Story Detective, April 1945.

  “Chipman? Room 1228,” the desk clerk purred. “Who is calling, please?”

  “D’ Argonne—Eddy D’ Argonne,” I told him.

  My palms were sweating and my stomach twisted up into a knot, I wondered if I’d ever get enough starch back into my knees to stick in the saddle tomorrow.

  Don’t laugh. Maybe you’ll understand when I tell you that the hotel’s revolving glass doors bit off pieces of the boom of San Diego’s night traffic outside and churned them into the lobby, so it sounded just like a twelve-horse field coming up behind me, fast.

  I had to hold onto the edge of the desk.

  “D’ Argonne?” the clerk repeats, “Oh, yes.”

  His polite smile breaks off at the edges into the ghost of a sneer. Of course anybody getting a good gander at my carrot thatch and freckles can connect the name.

  You know, the jockey who lost his nerve after a fall in the middle of the field at Caliente. Remember? Yeah.

  I tried to brace myself against the veiled sneer in the desk clerk’s eyes and I couldn’t. I hated myself for it. My eyes met his and turned away.

  Deep inside me something was ticking like the fuse on a time bomb. But I couldn’t meet his eyes.

  So I pried my fingers loose from the edge of the desk and walked toward the elevators, feeling the clerk’s stare drilling into my back every step of the way.

  It was all right with me if he forgot to phone Chipman I am on my way up. When you want to ask a guy like Van a question like why he hires you to ride a race tomorrow, and then bets against his own nag, you want to walk right in on him without giving him time to think up answers.

  I was glad when the elevator doors sliced off the sound that came through from the street. Until I saw the elevator jockey in the red jacket.

  “Well, now, if it ain’t Mr. D’Argonne!” he whispered, letting a sly grin slide across his greasy fat face. “Where you working these days?”

  That had a barb to it. He’d been a stable boy at Caliente until I caught him stealing sponges and chamois skins from my boss.

  That fuse was buzzing, way deep inside me, but I was cold and numb in the chest.

  “Naval Hospital, civilian employee,” I told him. “But I’m still in training.”

  “Whadda ya do at the hospital? Hand out horse liniment?”

  The two or three other passengers in the elevator snickered. I tried to grin, but it felt sick on my face, so I stopped trying.

  “Yeah,” I whispered. “Horse liniment.”

  The elevator stopped. I got rattled and thought it was my floor. I saw it wasn’t and started back in. “Wrong floor!” I muttered. They were all grinning.

  The elevator doors slammed shut in my face. “Hey!” I said.

  I could hear them laughing in the elevator as it went on up past the floor.

  For a minute I just stood there, with both fists balled up against the steel doors. My breath felt taut inside me. It didn’t go down all the way into my lungs, but only shallow and short. There was a funny taste in my mouth.

  I could feel that fuse ticking slow and deep, and I wondered what’s on the other end of it.

  So I walked up the stairs to my floor and down the hall, thinking.

  I walked right up against a guy’s hand, pushing my chest. I realized somebody’d said something just before and that I’d only half heard it. I guess I was dropping a few stitches.

  “What?” I asked, in a fog.

  A chunky, bald guy in a blue serge business suit blocked the way. He said, “Where d’ya think y’ going, Shorty?”

  I tried to make myself throw a punch, but a school girl could do better. The guy only grabbed my arm. “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” he said slow and amused.

  He held up a deputy’s badge. “House detective,” he informed me. “You can’t go any further down this wing without an invitation from the movie dame who’s taken it. She’s throwing a party for a Marine Defense Battalion just back from the South Pacific. Say, where did y’think y’was going, Shorty!”

  “1228. Room 1228,” I said.

  I guess it was the smell of his cheap cigar that made me feel sick. I was hungry—having a hard time to make the weight—and that makes your smeller sharp.

  “1228 is back the other way,” he said, giving me a sharp look. “Down the hall and to the left.”

  I went back and found it. Outside the door I stopped a minute. My heart flopped like a fish. It was one thing to think about how I’d lay it right on the line. It was something else to open that door and say it.

  Just like it was one thing to dream about a comeback as a reinsman and another to know I had to go through with it tomorrow.

  I’d started out walking a tightrope. It had turned into the thin edge of a knife blade way out over the steepest mountainside in the world, with a million people ready to laugh every time I hesitated.

  The doorknob of 1228 seemed to get bigger, like a balloon being blown up. It swam at me out of a haze.

  I took
a big breath and grabbed it. The door opened and shut. I was inside.

  Two men looked up quickly and moved quickly.

  One of them was Chipman. His hand swept across the little dinner table and dropped a napkin on something that sparkled in the light.

  The other guy was a blond Marine, about my size. He got halfway out of his chair in one move, and his right hand went to the sleeve of his left.

  “Well, well,” Van Chipman’s suave voice said. His eyes were cold as pale stones in his dark, soft face. “If it isn’t that bootin’, kickin’ jock, Eddy D’ Argonne.”

  The sneer in his voice built that ticking up inside me, speeded it.

  “I had to talk to you, Van,” I said. My mouth was so dry I had to keep licking my lips.

  “Mr. Chipman,” said Chipman.

  I swallowed it. “OK. Mr. Chipman.”

  I’d seen that blond Marine somewhere. He wore the shoulder patch of a South Pacific unit and the service ribbons to go with it. His thin face with the soft blond hair around it struck something in my memory like a warning gong. But I was too busy with Chipman.

  “Listen, Mr. Chipman. I gotta know—”

  “Listen, you ill-bred little saddle monkey, what do you mean by slamming into my room without knocking!”

  I had a quick remember of the time he introduced me to his friends in the bar of the St. Francis after a day at Bay Meadows and was proud I called him Van.

  I spoke up over the smooth, even ticking of that fuse inside me. “Why’d you lay five grand against Zalacain—your own horse—in the third race tomorrow?”

  Chipman picked up a broiled lamb chop and took a bite out of it with even white teeth. “One thing at a time, little man,” he chuckled.

  The way he said it hit me on a numb spot. I took it and yet wondered why I took it. Maybe I’m yellow. It’s what I’d been wondering, thinking...