Great Noir Fiction

by Ed Gorman (ed)

  We stood there and the moonlight was bright on her face. Her dress was all torn, her hair mussed up, and there was this streak of blood on her cheek. There was something about it. It got me a little. She looked so damned alone and afraid, her eyes big and pleading. And there she stood, hanging onto that brief case, like that.

  Chapter 3

  Well, near the edge of the town, there was this big billboard beside the concrete. It was at the bottom of a shallow slope, across a small creek. We were walking tenderly, me with the blood drying in my sock. And Vivian in her stocking feet, on tiptoe. A car passed us, but by that time we were behind the billboard out of sight.

  She took off her dress. ‘Turn your back, Nichols,’ she said, ‘and get some clothes out of his suitcase. We’ve got to get away from here. Hurry!’

  I was afraid if I sat down I’d never get up. I staggered around, having trouble with the one sock. Finally when I yanked at it, it peeled like adhesive, but was stiff as cardboard. There was quite a hole where the glass had stuck in, and it was bleeding again. The hell with it. Only that was the whiskey still talking.

  After she got through, I scrubbed off the blood and mud. My ankle kept bleeding. I fumbled in the suitcase and found a handkerchief and tied it around my ankle.

  I kept glancing over there at that brief case. ‘I’ll help you find a room. That much.’

  Still trying to convince myself. I got dressed in his clothes, transferred my wallet and stuff and put my coat and hat on again.

  She bundled the old clothes together and walked away into the trees. When she came back, she didn’t have them. Her movements were still jerky. You could tell by the way she moved and looked that she was living in a pool of fright.

  ‘No kidding, where’d you get that money?’

  ‘It’s mine.’

  We closed the suitcases.

  She picked up the brief case and started out around the billboard. Then she glanced back. The moonlight was on her—fur jacket, long black hair, high heels and scared.

  ‘All right,’ I grabbed the two suitcases, forgetting about my pinky. It hurt like hell. I went on after her, dressed in a dead man’s clothes.

  I kept trying hard not to think of what Bess would think of this business. It wasn’t much good. Then I looked at that brief case in Vivian’s hand again. ‘You’ll have to take one of these suitcases.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because my finger’s busted, that’s why. I can’t handle the both of them.’

  She took hers and went on. I didn’t want all that money. Just a part of it. Her heels rapped real loud on the asphalt. She had a long stride and she walked with her chin up.

  On the road we kind of half-ran, half-walked. She kept looking behind us, and trying to see ahead. She had me as nervous as herself.

  She was taking some kind of big chance.

  So was I. But she knew what it was, what the odds were. I was playing it blind.

  There was more to the town than I’d figured, but it still wasn’t much. All the houses were asleep and her heels made terrific echoes in the still cold.

  A car came down the main drag and she gave me a shove into a store front. I listened to her breathe, with her face pressed right up to mine. It was kids in the car, with the radio blaring.

  ‘Off the main street, Nichols.’

  We turned away from the car tracks. There was a hotel down there with a rusty-looking marquee and white bulbs saying: Hotel Ambassador. Three bulbs in the ‘D’ were smashed. She stopped under the marquee and faced me. ‘You can’t just leave me.’

  ‘Why can’t I?’

  ‘You’ve come this far. It’s not going to hurt you.’

  I looked at her, saying nothing.

  ‘Is it, Nichols? How could it?’

  The wind blew down the street, dusting along the curb, blowing newspapers and small trash past the hotel.

  ‘Look, Nichols. You can’t imagine the jam I’m in.’

  ‘That’s any reason why I should be in it with you?’

  ‘I’m not asking that.’

  I looked down at the brief case, then remembered what she’d said about paying me. ‘I was just on my way home,’ I said.

  ‘I know that. St. Pete, wasn’t it? Well, you can’t start home now, anyway, Nichols. You’re tired. I’m not asking a whole lot. I can’t do it myself. You’ll have to help me. I’ve got to get out of the country.’

  ‘Honest to God, you sound crazy.’

  ‘That’s the way it is. I’ll pay for it. I’m not asking you to do it for nothing.’

  ‘I’ve already—’

  ‘That’s what I mean. Listen, I’m so scared that it’s all I can do to walk. If I told you, you’d understand.’

  ‘I don’t want to know.’

  ‘But I’ve got to tell you.’

  We stood there, and the accident and the dead guy sat there in the back of my mind. I’d already come this far, and it was a long way.

  Her knuckles were white, she was holding the brief case that tight. The wind started to blow in her hair. She set her suitcase down and lifted her hand and brushed some hair off her cheek. She was an absolute knockout.

  ‘Well?’

  Chapter 4

  It had to be one room. When I said something about getting separate rooms, you could see the fear bubbling up inside her like acid. She wouldn’t leave me for a second.

  I felt pretty bad. I needed a drink and I was sick. Only there wasn’t any chance of getting a drink, and I kept thinking more and more all of a sudden, about that dead guy back there in the gully, bloody and broken.

  ‘I’ll pay you well, Nichols.’

  ‘Get off it, will you?’

  So we were Mr. and Mrs. Ed Latimer on the register. I couldn’t see as it mattered much. The clerk yawned and blinked and tossed me the keys and said, ‘Two-oh-two.’

  But when we went up the stairs, I glanced back and he was watching her legs from under his hand.

  It sure was a dingy place.

  She sat on the bed and said, ‘Cripes!’

  I didn’t say anything. There was the bed, a straight-backed chair, a paint-peeling, battle-scarred bureau with an empty water pitcher and a pencil on the bare top. There were brown curtains on the window, and the walls were painted blue. There was one lamp by the bed with a frothy pink shade, and the bathroom looked older than the hotel.

  She sat there on the bed and I stood by the closed door and it was cold. Finally she got up and went over and peeked out the window, around the shade, and turned with her hands clasped together like she was praying.

  ‘They won’t find me here. Not only one night.’ She looked at me, then she took off her fur jacket and hung it in the closet. She opened her suitcase and said, ‘Here.’ She had a bottle. ‘It didn’t break,’ she said. ‘Noel always had a lot of bottles.’

  ‘Get off him.’

  ‘He might even have another in his bag, there.’

  Something came up in me. It was like fighting, and you get in a good punch. This punch was aimed at that something inside me. I hadn’t been able to level off. But now I had a flash of that old white logic.

  I turned and went over to the door and opened it. ‘The hell with this. I’m taking off.’

  I walked out and closed the door and started down the hall. The door opened and her heels rattled down the hall after me. ‘Nichols!’

  ‘No.’

  She grabbed my arm. I dragged her a couple of steps and stopped.

  ‘It’s my money. I’m afraid.’

  ‘You’re lying like hell. You expect me to believe something like that?’

  ‘Make it business, then—let’s say I hired you.’

  ‘Let go.’

  We were standing next to a door. The door opened and a guy stuck his head out and stared at us. ‘Will you two please shut up?’

  We went back into the room and I stood by the door, holding it open, and looked at that brief case leaning against the night table. She had the bottle. The scarf
she’d tied around the brief case was red, bright red.

  She began to look as if she’d fall to pieces. It was all jammed up inside her and she didn’t know what to do. Then she set the bottle on the bureau. There was a woolen blanket folded at the foot of the bed. She took it out and spread it and opened the bed.

  ‘I’m freezing, Nichols.’

  I went and sat in the chair and looked at the bottle. Then I took it and opened it and had a long drink.

  I looked at her and she was standing there in the middle of the room, staring at the wall. She had her hands together like that. She kept staring, lost.

  The color of the dress she’d put on was taffy. Some sort of soft material. It stuck to her. She had a lot of chin, too, and a broad soft mouth and these great big frightened eyes.

  ‘You’re going to tell me, lady. Who was it following us? What’s it all about?’

  ‘I’d better have some of that, Nichols.’

  She took a sip out of the bottle, and I went over and closed the door and took off my coat and hat. She sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at the floor. I could see her getting ready to lie again. Then she crossed her legs and leaned back on her elbows. She cleared her throat, and I looked at that brief case again.

  ‘So Noel was my boyfriend. You can call it that. I’ve known him for three years. He took money down this way every two months.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The people—the people he worked for.’

  ‘Yeah. But who?’

  ‘Well.’ She folded her fingers together and bent her hands back and swallowed. I took a drink, watching her. As she watched me, her eyes kind of hazed over with thinking, Can I get away with a lie? And then her eyes cleared, and she wasn’t going to lie. You could see that little bit of relief in her, too. And I couldn’t get that money out of my mind. She cleared her throat again. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘Noel, he worked for the syndicate. He was a courier.’ She paused. ‘My God,’ she said, ‘the things that can happen!’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I don’t care. Anyway, they had him making runs through the South. The syndicate runs gambling places in the South, see? It’s a very carefully controlled business. For instance, there’s a place in Baltimore, and Atlanta, too. Well, every two months it was Noel’s job to make the run with working capital. He carried cancelled checks, papers, notifications of change, stuff like that. Sometimes he’d pick up a part of the take, sometimes not. He never really knew what would happen till he reached each place.’

  I watched her, listening, and not liking it.

  She said, ‘So I thought of how Noel and I could get this money. He would carry quite a pile on these trips, only they always watched him, tailed him. He never knew where, either. Listen, I was never mixed up in it. I just wanted to get him clear of them.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘It’s nobody’s money that’ll do any hurt. I mean, it’s not stealing. Not like—’ She stopped.

  I took another drink. She was tight. I don’t mean drunk, I mean scared, all tied up inside; frozen. You could feel it and she kept swallowing as she talked. The whiskey was reaching me, though.

  I kept feeling lower all the time. I kept remembering Bess, and her wondering where I was. This was five days now. Tomorrow would be six. Damn that Albert!

  She began to tremble. ‘Noel said he’d maybe try it. All right. So when they got so they trusted him, then we’d take the money and leave the country together. So every trip, he’d watch how they kept track of him. And we wanted a trip where he skipped the

  Baltimore and Atlanta places, see? One straight through. And this was it, this one. Only they must have caught on—there in Valdosta. We were going to New Orleans, along the coast and Noel made the wrong turn and one of them was waiting for that. Noel turned back, all right, but it was too late and he knew it. You couldn’t explain it, see? And with you in the car, too? And then, he made the run, and that was the worst, when Noel panicked. So that’s who was following us.

  ‘Listen, they won’t stop at anything now. You can’t just give them back the money. It’s too late for that. It’s too late for the stop at Tampa. That’s where he was supposed to go, and me with him. I wasn’t supposed to be with him. It’s too late for anything, but getting away.’ She paused, looking at me, bent over a little, her eyes wide and bright. ‘I’ve got to get away.’ She shook her head. ‘You can’t possibly understand. But right this minute, they’re hunting. It’s a lot of money. It was always in cash, see? It had to be that way for them, and Noel was a trusted courier. God, maybe they’ve missed the car, the wreck. So that’ll slow them down. But they’re hunting. And they know how to hunt. They’ll kill me.’

  Maybe some of it was lies. But basically it was the truth, because you could see it all through her.

  ‘Noel wanted to back out, but I kept at him. It’s my fault. We’d been arguing in the car when we stopped at that place. That’s half why he let you come along, I think, to—to shut me up. We were going right on to New Orleans.’

  She didn’t say anything for a time. I took another long one from the bottle and glanced at the brief case.

  ‘A lot of money?’

  ‘A terrible lot. But they’ve got crazy ethics. A thing like this is unpardonable. It’s like any business—except you know what they do to somebody who crosses them? You know what they do to a woman who crosses them?’ She looked away, her face pale and expressionless. Then she looked at me again. ‘But I’ve got that money and I’m keeping it. It took two and a half years to get this far.’

  ‘Not very damned far, huh?’

  She put both hands against her face and turned around.

  I looked at her back and I knew just why I was sticking here. It was the money, all the way. I’d seen it, and I couldn’t get it out of my head. Bess and I needed money so damned bad, and there it was right by my foot, leaning against the night table.

  It was crazy, maybe. She was crazy to think she could get away with it. And telling me all this, but she had nobody to turn to. In the back of my mind I began to know I was going to help her. It didn’t really matter where she got that money.

  I got up and went into the bathroom and found a glass. I washed the glass and filled it with water and came back and sat down in the chair again. I was drunk. I drank some of the water. It tasted like dust.

  ‘If you’re lying—I’ll quit on you.’

  She just looked at me.

  ‘I been a bum. Before I met Bess. She’s my wife.’

  She didn’t move. She was thinking.

  ‘That’s right. I was in the Merchant Marine, and the war. I been around enough to know. You think I don’t read you?’

  ‘You can get a car in the morning. I’ll give you the money, so you can buy a car.’

  ‘I met Bess in New Mexico, where her folks lived. A little town. We had that thing and we got married without a cent. I worked in a gas station and we bought a trailer, and I got hold of some dough and we bought a house. We sold the trailer. Then I couldn’t make it again, so we sold the house and bought a car and came to Florida. I worked the shrimpers. We saved a lot. Then I heard of this thing.’

  I was drunk and running off at the mouth. I couldn’t stop. I felt sad. I was trying to convince myself out loud that this was the thing to do. It was crazy, all right. But it was happening.

  ‘So finally I got a line on this place, a motel. Somebody’d built it in the wrong place and went broke. Then news got around they were going to put a new highway through. It’s coming right through in front of the motel. Twenty apartments. Bedroom, living room, kitchen and bath. Real nice.

  ‘So I’d never used my G.I. loan, see? So it was tough, but I got that and right along in there Bess’s old man died. He left her quite a bit. We used it all. I went into hock all around. We managed to get this place. We met the down payment. It’s nice. We’re happy. No money, but happy. Then payments begin to come due.’

  ‘Mmmm.’

  ‘We just manage, sweati
ng out the highway. They began work, see? Then we don’t manage and I had to start stalling. I got an extension from the bank, all right. But then that time went. I tried to get a job. I couldn’t find one that would pay enough.’ I took a long drink. ‘So they suspended work on the highway.’ I told her about the bank refusing a personal loan; how it was.

  ‘Why are you telling me all this?’

  ‘Just want you to know.’

  ‘You don’t know what trouble is, Nichols . . . Well, go ahead. Finish.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘this highway will sure be something, if it does come through. We’re right on it. We’ll get the business. From the North, straight through to Miami. They started work, sure. Only the ’dozers sit out there and the tar vats, and nobody’s working. Nothing happens, because that damned commissioner wants a different route. Meantime, if I don’t have the money, we lose the place. We lose the place—I’m done.’

  She leaned over and pushed her plump lips to my ear and said, ‘Nichols.’

  ‘So I went up to Chicago.’ I told her about Albert. ‘Tomorrow I’ll give you enough for the car. We’ll drive on down. Then you can see about plane tickets. Or a boat, or something so I can get out. I’ll pay you well, Nichols.’

  The bottle was empty. I dropped it on the floor.

  She reached over and put her palm against my face and turned my head. We looked at each other.

  I slumped back in the chair and watched her.

  She took her suitcase and went into the bathroom and when she came out I was still sitting there. She set her suitcase down and opened the other one. She was wearing a red polka-dot negligee. She found the bottle she’d mentioned and set it on the night stand and turned the light off. Then she moved by me to the window and raised the shade and opened the window. A cold wind yawned into the room. She went back and got into the bed. The sign from the hotel outside lit up the room.

  I got up and took the bottle and returned to the chair. I opened it and had a drink. Then I got the glass of water and drank some and set it on the bureau. I sat in the chair with the bottle and watched her.

  ‘You’ll freeze.’