A Horse’s Head

by Ed McBain

  Things were getting terribly complicated, and besides K was once again shouting “Stop or I’ll shoot!” which Mullaney knew very well he would not do.

  A shot rang out.

  The shot, carried on the wind, broke into a hundred echoing fragments of sound, put to rout the screaming banshees of the night, rushed away on the crest of its own cordite stench, and left behind it a stillness more appropriate to cemetery surroundings. Mullaney knew the shot had been intended only to frighten, but he was now impervious to fear because of his knowledge of the jacket’s whereabouts. Besides, he was beginning to realize something he had suspected all along, that his grandmother was simply full of shit, there were no ghosts, in or out of cemeteries. And since there were no ghosts to worry about, and since K could not harm him without eliminating the sole source of information about the jacket, he decided to play the same trick he had used to such marvelous advantage on Forty-second Street. He decided to reverse his field and charge K, knock him head over teacups and then run out of the cemetery and vanish until tomorrow morning. The wind was blowing fiercely as he turned, billowing into his jasmine shirt, causing the fabric to balloon out from his body. K stopped some twenty feet away from him and extended his arm again, the blued revolver in his hand pointing like an accusing finger. You can’t scare me, pal, Mullaney thought, and permitted himself a grin as he rushed toward K. An orange spark flared in the night, there was the sound of the gun going off and then nothing, and then a whistling tearing rush of air, and Mullaney was surprised to see a neat little bullet hole appear in his jasmine shirt where it ballooned out not three inches from his heart. He was surprised to see the bullet hole because if K was trying to frighten him, he was carrying things just a trifle too far. Didn’t K realize Mullaney was the source? Didn’t K realize Mullaney knew where the jacket was?

  A third shot sounded on the air, and this time the bullet whistled past Mullaney’s left ear in terrifying proximity. He decided he had better knock K down before K did something he would be terribly sorry for later, like maybe killing Mullaney and therefore never finding out where the jacket was. Mullaney stepped to the left in a broken-field tactic he had learned from the encyclopedia, FA–FO, just as K fired again. Then he threw a block he had learned from the same volume, shoulder low, legs piston-bent, shoving up and back, catching K in the ribs and sending him tumbling over, the gun going off wildly in his hand for the fifth time, more than enough for an empty revolver if the gun was any one of a half-dozen or so in the Smith & Wesson line, but leaving yet another shot or more if the gun was one of the other Smith & Wessons, or a Colt, or a Ruger, or—oh boy there were too damn many of them, volume PA–PL, see also Handguns, Revolvers, Weapons and Warfare.

  Mullaney ran.

  He ran with uncontrollable glee, cavorting between the gravestones, laughing to the night, delighted to have learned that his grandmother was full of shit, delighted to have knocked K on his ass, and delighted to be the only person in the entire world who knew the jacket was important and who also knew where it was—which was to say, delighted to be himself, Andrew Mullaney.

  It was funny the way Mullaney got to be a fugitive from the law within the next ten minutes. Oh, not funny the way Feinstein’s death had been, but funny in a fateful sort of way that caused him to reflect later upon the vagaries of chance and the odds against drawing to an inside straight.

  He had come perhaps six blocks from the monument works when he realized that an automobile was following him. Glancing rapidly over his shoulder, he saw only the car’s headlights on the dark street, about half a block behind him. He quickened his pace, but the car maintained its distance, rolling along slowly beside the curb. He was in a suburban area of two-family houses that spread out in monotonous sameness from the cemetery’s boundaries, and whereas there were lights on in many of the houses, the thought of knocking on one of those doors and telling someone he was being followed by a car possibly containing people who wanted to know where he had left the jacket he’d been wearing when they placed him in the coffin—the thought was ludicrous. Besides, as the car passed under a street lamp, Mullaney noticed that it had a distinctive green-and-white color combination and that it also sported a dome light, and it occurred to him just as the dome light came on and began revolving in a Martian manner, that the car was a police car.

  “Hey you!” a voice behind him shouted, and he recognized the voice as belonging to one of the cops who had picked him up at the approach to the Queensboro Bridge. “You with the funeral story!” the voice continued, as if Mullaney needed further proof that these were his old friends Freddie and Lou, returning to correct their oversight of an hour before. The oversight, as Mullaney saw it, was that they had neglected to arrest him. They had undoubtedly taken a coffee break after dropping him off at McReady’s friendly establishment, and had discussed the fellow in the jasmine shirt over their steaming cups of brew, coming to the conclusion that he had looked highly suspicious and dangerous and was undoubtedly armed and wanted for any number of crimes in California and some of the border states. They had then finished their prune and cheese Danishes and had come back to Queens to track him down, checking McReady’s spooky courtyard first, and then cruising the streets where, worse luck, it had been comparatively simple to spot a man in a jasmine shirt.

  So now they were behind him with their dome light revolving and their spotlight suddenly in action, bathing him in its glare as if he were trying to jump the wall at Sing Sing, and shouting, “You! You with the cockamamie story! Stop or we’ll shoot!” which everyone seemed to be yelling at Mullaney lately, and which left him no choice but to cut around the corner toward the cemetery fence again, and leap the fence, and start running once again among the gravestones, though this time neither with fear nor jubilation. This time he ran with all the experience of a graveyard veteran, all the concentration of a steeplechase racer, dodging in and out of the stones, ducking, weaving, bobbing, running for a distant fence beyond which he could see a row of lighted apartment buildings. He had no idea where Freddie and Lou were, whether they had abandoned the squad car and were chasing him on foot, or whether they were simply cruising the cemetery’s boundaries waiting for him to emerge again. That was a chance he would have to take. He felt certain that they were here to arrest him, and felt more than certain they would do exactly that the moment they saw the bullet hole K had put in his nice shirt. So he ran without fear and without joy, simply doing what had to be done, trying not to knock over any of the older, smaller gravestones, but concentrating on getting out of the cemetery and away from Freddie and Lou because tomorrow morning he hoped to get back to the New York Public Library to retrieve the jacket and wring from it its secret. The trick was to stay alive and out of sight until tomorrow morning at nine or ten or whenever the hell it was the library opened (he would get there at eight, to make sure) and that meant staying away from K’s fellows and also Kruger’s fellows, and now the Police Commissioner’s fellows because he did not want to be arrested as a vagrant and have to spend however many days on Riker’s Island. A fellow was a vagrant only if he didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life, and Mullaney knew exactly what he wanted to do—or at least thought he did.

  So he ran until he was out of breath, and then he rested behind one of the larger tombs (though not as large as Feinstein’s) and then began running again toward that distant fence beyond which the apartment lights beckoned. When he reached the fence, he paused again, crouching behind a large marble slab, listening. He could hear nothing but the sound of a solitary cricket. Across the street, the apartment houses rose in illuminated majesty, and beyond them was the entire borough of Queens, which was certainly a large enough place in which to hide. Cautiously, quietly, he climbed the fence and dropped to his knees. He crouched a moment longer, still listening. Then he rose.

  The spotlight came on the moment he stood erect.

  “There he is!” Lou shouted.

  “Shoot him!” Freddie said.

  Mu
llaney broke into a run as the spotlight picked him up, beginning to feel the same indignation he had felt when Hijo threw him down the poolhall steps, wanting to turn and tell these fellows they were civil-service employees who were supposed to protect citizens like himself, not go turning spotlights on him, and not—for God’s sake, they were shooting! They were both of them shooting at him, one of them standing outside the car and resting his revolver on his bent arm, and the other one manipulating the spotlight and getting off a shot every now and then, though neither of them were as good shots as K had been, neither of them came anywhere near putting a bullet in him or even his shirt. Out of breath, angry, indignant though unafraid, Mullaney ran across the street and into the nearest apartment building, saw the open and waiting elevator and was about to enter it when the doors closed. He looked up at the indicator, saw it marking the elevator’s slow rise, calculated immediately that Freddie and Lou would assume he was in the elevator, and decided to take the steps up instead. He found the service stairway, opened the door (A sign warned KEEP THIS DOOR CLOSED FOR PROTECTION AGAINST FIRE, but it said nothing about PROTECTION AGAINST POLICE) and ran up the steps to the third floor. On the third floor, he opened another fire door and stepped into the corridor.

  He had no idea what he would do next.

  He heard music coming from the end of the corridor, voices, laughter. A party, he thought, and he decided to crash it, and then decided he could not take the chance because suppose they called the police and said somebody was trying to crash their party? He would then have not only Freddie and Lou chasing him but the whole damn Queens police force, and besides he wasn’t in a party mood. In fact, it made him even more angry and indignant to realize that these happy Queens residents could be enjoying themselves at a party, drinking and laughing and dancing and having a grand old time while he, Andrew Mullaney, was being chased all over the city by gunmen of every persuasion. He had never been able to successfully crash a party in his life, but his anger now provided him with exactly the motivation he needed. He thought, as he marched angrily and indignantly to the apartment at the end of the hall, how marvelous it was that human beings could always find motivation whenever or wherever they needed it. Still marveling, he raised his fist, certain that he knew exactly how to crash the party. He banged on the door and waited. He heard the sounds of music within, and laughter, and then the clattering approach of high heels, and the chain being drawn back, and the door being unlocked.

  The door opened.

  “I live in the apartment downstairs,” Mullaney said angrily and indignantly. “You’re making too much noise, and I can’t fall asleep.”

  “Well then come on in, honey, and have a drink,” the girl said.

  7. MELANIE

  The girl was Nefertiti, the girl was Cleopatra as she must have really looked, the girl was colored, her skin as brown as nicotine, her eyes glowing and glinting and black, her hair cropped tight to her skull, huge golden earrings dangling, mouth full and parted in a beautiful wicked smile over great white sparkling teeth, the better to eat you with my dear, he had written sonnets about girls like this.

  There was behind her the insinuating beat of a funky jazz tune, Thelonious Monk or Hampton Hawes, there was behind her the smoky greyness of a room indifferent to skin, the insistent clink and clash of whiskied ice and laughter, the off-key humming of a sinewy blonde in a purple dress, the fingersnapping click of a lean dark Negro in a dark blue suit, there was behind her the aroma of bodies, the aroma of perfume. And—also behind her, also seeming to rise from far behind her where lions roared to the velvet night and Kilimanjaro rose in misty splendor—rising from far behind her like mist itself, and undetected by her as she stood in smiling welcome in the doorway, one long brown slender arm resting on the door jamb, was a scent as comforting as a continent, he had written sonnets about girls like this.

  “Well, come on in, honey, do,” she said, and turned her back and went into the room.

  He followed her in, immediately closing and locking the door behind him, shutting out the menace of Freddie and Lou, shutting out the menace of the sharpshooting K and the smokestacking Kruger, the memory of Merilee, the promise of whatever secret the jacket would reveal. He enclosed himself in a warm protective cocoon and watched the girl’s lovely sinuous behind in the tight Pucci dress as she walked across the room ahead of him. She turned a small pirouette, lifted one hand in introduction, wrist bent, and announced, “The cat downstairs. He can’t sleep.”

  “Give the man a drink,” someone said, and Mullaney thought Here we go again.

  “Is that a bullet hole in your shirt?” the girl asked.

  “Yes,” he answered. “How can you tell?”

  “When you’ve seen one bullet hole,” she said, “you’ve seen them all. Sit down and tell me how you got it.”

  He sat in an easy chair near the window where the borough of Queens winked its nighttime sky against the greater Friday glow of Manhattan, and the girl sat on the arm of the chair with her thigh in its Pucci silk tight against his arm, and the scent rising again from her, strong and intoxicating; he did not need the drink someone pressed into his hand.

  “I was cleaning my revolver …” he started.

  “Oh, you were cleaning your revolver,” the girl said.

  “Yes, and it went off.”

  “You must be more careful,” the girl said. “Are the fuzz after you?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he answered honestly.

  “I thought they might be. The reason I thought they might be is because the person who lives downstairs is an old lady of seventy years of age who can hardly walk because of her arthritis, and not a man in a pretty yellow shirt with a bullet hole in it.”

  “If you knew I wasn’t the lady downstairs, why’d you let me in?”

  “I’m partial to blue eyes.”

  “My eyes are brown.”

  “That’s why I let you in.”

  “But you said …”

  “I’m drunk, who knows what I’m saying?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Rose.”

  “Really? My mother’s name was …”

  “No.”

  “It’s not Rose?”

  “No. It’s Abigail.”

  “All right, why’d you let me in, Abigail?”

  “Don’t call me Abigail. My name is Melanie.”

  “Is it really?”

  “Absolutely. Melanie is from the Greek, it means black.”

  “But is it your name?”

  “I just said so, didn’t I?”

  “You also said it was Rose and Abigail.”

  “That’s right, it’s Melanie Rose Abigail. Do you like that name?”

  “I like it.”

  “Which one?”

  “All of them.”

  “I like Melanie best.”

  “Why’d you let me in the apartment, Melanie?”

  “I didn’t want the fuzz to get you, that’s right, call me Melanie, say Melanie. I don’t like the fuzz to get anybody, not even murderers. Are you a murderer?”

  “No, Melanie.”

  “Then why are the fuzz after you?”

  “Because they think I look suspicious.”

  “You do look suspicious.”

  “That’s because I’m a gambler, and also because I have a bullet hole in my shirt.”

  “No. It’s because you have the look of a man who is searching for something, and Mother always taught me to regard such a man with suspicion and doubt.”

  “Is that how you regard me?”

  “Yes. Who put the hole in your shirt?”

  “A man named K.”

  “Who is a lousy shot.”

  “I don’t think he was trying to hit me.”

  “Then why did he shoot at you?”

  “To scare me.”

  “Did he?”

  “No.”

  “What are you searching for?”

  “Half a million dollars.”

  “
Will you settle for a clean shirt that doesn’t have a bullet hole in it?”

  “Do you have one?”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “If you have one, I’ll settle for it. For the time being.”

  “Oh my, what will the man want next?” Melanie said, and rolled her eyes. She extended her hand to him. “Come,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “To where I may have a shirt or two laying around.”

  “Which is where?”

  “Questions, questions. Don’t you trust me?”

  “The police are in the building. Should I trust you?”

  “Honey, who are you going to trust? When the fuzz come busting in here, which they will most certainly do if they’re already in the building, do you want them to find a suspicious-looking man with a bullet hole in his pretty yellow shirt, or do you want them to find a contented-looking man in a white shirt and a silk rep tie and perhaps a jacket that is still hanging in the closet of my bedroom that used to belong to a bass guitar player I kicked out last month, though not of your color? Would you like them to find a fellow whose pants look like they shrunk up three sizes too small for him, or would you like them to find a well-dressed Ivy League type in nice pleatless slacks made for my bass guitar player friend at Chipp’s, now which is it you prefer, and how can you afford not to trust me?”

  “I trust you,” Mullaney said.

  “That’s fine,” Melanie answered, “because I have never trusted a white man in my entire life.”

  “Then why are you helping me?”

  “It’s the blue eyes that get me,” Melanie said. “Also, I like gamblers.”

  “They’re brown.”

  “Yes, but I’m drunk.”

  “Which is probably the only reason you’re helping me.”

  “No. I don’t like you to look so suspicious. I want you to look contented, man, contented.”

  “How will we manage that?” Mullaney asked.

  “I have never kissed a man who did not look extremely contented afterwards.”