Gat Heat

by Richard S. Prather

“Oh, all right,” she said and smiled.

  She had marvelous teeth. Perfectly even and almost luminously white, their clean look accentuated by the ripe redness of her sweetly curving lips.…

  Why was she smiling?

  “We can even chat while you’re mugged and booked,” I said. “This isn’t actually an arrest—not yet. The police can handle that formality. So I don’t think I have to tell you you’re not supposed to say anything, or confess, or even feel guilty, and that you can have a lawyer, and even if you can’t afford one we’ll get you some. Shall we go?”

  She looked at me with what seemed a great lack of comprehension in her eyes.

  “Police?” she said. “What police?”

  “The ones I’m taking you to. So they can jug you.”

  She stepped to the chaise longue, brushing past me, turned and sank down upon it. She crossed her ams beneath her breasts, reaching up to grip those smooth bare arms beneath her shoulders—at the same time lifting her bosom approximately three inches into the air. At least.

  I was still thinking about her brushing past me and, at the some time, noting the remarkable things she could do with her anatomy, which she was holding way up there with her arms, when she flung her arms out to the side. Woweewow. Truly remarkable. They were alive. Birds, trapped in a downy nest, spreading their wild wings to fly—

  “I don’t understand,” she cried. “What do you mean?”

  “Just a second,” I said. “Half a sec.”

  She pulled her arms back in, clutched them beneath her shoulders again.

  “Hold still, will you?” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just hold still, that’s all. Don’t go flanging—”

  “But—police? Why police?”

  For a moment she appeared to go slightly out of focus and then the double image blended into one again, like when you’re using a range finder atop a camera.

  I gave my head a little shake and said, “Come off it. I saw you down at the Hamilton Building. A few minutes after two p.m. it was. You can’t deny it, Dilly.”

  “Of course not—quit calling me Dilly, will you? Why would I deny it?”

  “You took off like a scared rabbit, for one thing—one of many. Before I’d even seen that dead guy lying there in pools of blood—”

  “Please, don’t remind me. Shell—I thought it was you!”

  “Yeah, that’s what I figured. You and a couple other—”

  “And then, when I saw you—alive!—I nearly fainted.”

  “Yeah, I remember. That’s the very first thing that got me suspicious—”

  “At first I couldn’t believe it. But when I realized it was you standing there next to me, truly you, it was like waking up from a bad dream, from a nightmare. I was so relieved, so happy—”

  “Hey, hold it. Cool it a minute. Something is cracked. How could you be relieved? You called Hazel and made the appointment with your sexy voice. You wanted me dead there, lying in pools of blood—”

  “Oh, how cruel!”

  “Didn’t you?”

  Her face twisted a little, and her eyes seemed to get mistier. “You know I didn’t, you must know. When I saw you—him, but I believed it was you—lying there in pools of blood, I thought my heart would break.”

  “Let’s go through that again. In a bit more detail, Dilly.”

  “Quit calling me Dilly!”

  I looked around. Everything seemed normal. The sun was a bit lower, its beams filtering through the branches of the trees and dancing on the pool’s surface. People frolicked in the water. Didn’t see Ed Walles, though.

  Yeah, Ed. Where had he got to?

  I was going to have to get on Edward’s track right away. But one thing at a time. I was having enough trouble with this one. This one, who sure didn’t seem to like it when I called her Dilly Pickle. That I could understand, if it wasn’t her name. Who, with any other name, would want to be called Dilly Pickle? But if she wasn’t Dilly, I was going to be sinking for the third time in confusion. I’d have to start all over again.

  She had to be Dilly, though. It made sense, very good sense—at least it had just a little while ago. When I’d been standing in the lobby and experienced my little revelation, when the thought “Dilly Pickle was a girl” swirled in my mind, it had there been swirling with at least four or five other dim elucidations which made it transparently apparent—then, at least—that he had to be Dilly.

  Of course, if she wasn’t, if she was really Rangoon O’Toole, or whatever she’d said, that meant …

  Yes, it meant that my sticky gob of sadness could dissolve. It meant there might yet be the possibility of something between us, something good between us.

  I looked down at her again, musing.

  She was saying, “I didn’t mean to shout at you, Shell. But my name is Burma O’Hare. It’s a good name. I like it. And if you can’t call me Burma, don’t call me anything.”

  “I guess it doesn’t make much difference what I call you,” I said.

  She reached forward and took my right hand in both of hers—my left hand was still hanging onto that big Bolex, which was getting pretty heavy—and said, “I guess I should confess, Shell—”

  “Well, it’s about time—”

  “—how I’ve felt about you all these years. I might as well get it off my chest, even if it means nothing to you.”

  She said a lot of queer things. Did a few, too. For example, when she’d mentioned getting someting off her chest, she’d got something on it instead. She’d leaned forward and risen to her feet, and somehow had unconsciously pulled my hand close to press the back of it against her left breast.

  That white jersey didn’t merely look thin, it felt thin; it felt like nothing. The sensation was much like having one’s hand pressed against bare skin with a faint warp and weft in it.

  She dropped her right hand to her side, but kept the other one holding mine against the warp and weft, and looked up at me. “But I can’t tell you here, Shell. Not with all these people near, maybe listening. I’d be too embarrassed. Can we walk a little way?”

  “O.K., if you’ll explain what you’re getting at.”

  We walked the length of the pool and then over a graveled path toward a small bridge arching above a narrow stream a few yards ahead. Beyond the bridge was a narrow path, a kind of “lover’s lane,” winding through green growth beneath overhanging limbs of densely growing trees. A few little birds fluttered and hopped from limb to twig.

  As we walked Dilly explained in a quiet voice that though we’d never really met before, she felt she knew me intimately. She’d known about me a long time, a long time, had followed my career, read about some of my cases in newspapers and magazines. She did seem to know a lot about my cases, including some of the real good ones.

  We went over the little bridge and started down the little path, out of sight of those others behind us now. Dilly was still holding my hand. And, still unconsciously I guessed, pressing its back against her left breast. I wondered if I ought to say something to her about it. But I didn’t want to make a big thing of it and maybe embarrass her. She’d said just talking about this was embarrassing for her.

  Burma—or Dilly, whoever she was—continued, telling me she’d thought about me often and often, even at night, lying awake in bed. She never did actually come right out and say what she was thinking, lying there nude in the sack—she didn’t quite say nude, either, I don’t believe; it was certainly the impression I got, however—but it wasn’t anything hateful, I was pretty sure.

  She’d actually kept the newspaper stories and such in scrap-books, she admitted. Two were filled already, and she was working on the third one. While confessing this, I noticed she often looked behind us, and glanced all around occasionally. Probably watching the birds in the trees, I thought. She was a gal who would like birds.

  Birds, I thought. What was it I’d been thinking about birds?

  We were pretty well out in a reasonabl
y authentic jungle by now. Might even be eagles out here. Possibly we should be heading back, I thought. Besides, Burma had been kind of gently moving my hand once in a while, sort of sliding it around against her warmsoftness, and within the last few seconds her unconscious seemed to have taken a turn for the worse, because—how it happened I shall really never know for certain—somehow she’d gotten my hand turned around so that not its back but its front was pressed against her soft warmnest, and anybody who didn’t know what was going on might have concluded I was deliberately clutching her bird in my hand. I was pretty uncomfortable.

  The thing was, because of that circumstance plus the fact that Burma and I were walking side by side and still on that narrow path, in order not to dislocate my arm at the shoulder it had become necessary for me to sort of stoop forward and twist my body a bit, thus adopting a rather spastic posture not strikingly suitable for strolling along Lover’s Lane.

  Burma didn’t seem to notice anything unusual, however, in my somewhat hobbling and sidling gait. Maybe it was the way she always walked in the woods with guys she was crazy about.

  Yeah, she was crazy about me. She’d practically come right out and said it.

  She had also been telling me how, when she’d heard the shots just after noon today, she had rushed from her desk—she worked downtown. She’d even told me where. It was in a big building, down there. Down there somewhere. And when she’d seen that white-haired corpse lying there in pools of blood … She choked up then.

  She slowed, came to a stop.

  “Shell,” she said, in a voice charged with emotion.

  “Yeah?” I started straightening up. “Uhh—ack.”

  “What’s the matter, darling?”

  “I’ve, uh, got a little crick in my back and arm, that’s all. There—Oh—aah! Think that got it.”

  “Shell …” She moved close. That is, even closer. Pretty damn close. “Do you see? Do you understand now?”

  There were tears in her little-gray-fleck-flecked hazel eyes. She was weeping.

  It was all clear now, clear as glass. Why, when she’d seen that poor old man plugged she’d thought it was Shell Scott. Me lying there in pools of blood. She’d thought I was dead. Dead—after all her dreams … her hungers … her scrapbooks.

  “Shell …”

  “Yeah?”

  “You do understand?”

  “Yeah. Yeah.”

  “Darling I want you to—to kiss me just once. Just once before we go back.”

  “Once? What’s this once? We’re on Lover’s Lane, aren’t we? Way out here in the wilds? All alone? Just us and the trees and little birds, right? What’s with once? Twice, three times—maybe even a score, a gross—”

  That was as far as I got.

  She put both arms around my neck and flowed against me and up me like a warm flesh river, her lips finding mine, and then we came to the rapids. I felt her lips on my lips, knew her tongue and her fingertips, a hand strayed over my cheek, long fingernails sharp against my neck, the hand straying, straying …

  Well, all I can say is, no matter what might have been scheduled by the Fates to follow that kiss, it was indisputably a kiss worth kissing. More than that it was to a mere kiss what one cold A and B is to the whole can of hot alphabet soup. It was as though luscious, lovelorn, Hungry Burma O’Hare had been saving up for years and years, the dear; and in one grand and imaginative moment deposited it all, plus accumulated interest compounded, on my amazed chops.

  She moved away from me after a minute or two. Or three. Who counts? She sighed a big sigh and said, “Wait here, darling. I’ll be right back.”

  “Back? Where you going? Here we are in the trees … With the birds …”

  She was a hundred feet away already. Maybe she had a weak bladder.

  No, I was the one with the weak bladder.

  So would you have been if you could have seen what I saw and heard what I heard.

  What I saw was Burma O’Hare disappearing around a curve in the path; and then coming around that same curve—coming this way very speedily—four hard-looking and apparently maniacal individuals.

  Individual hoods, undoubtedly; they had the look of hoods, and they had the enormous deadly ugly guns of hoods.

  What I heard was a bunch of yelling from those hoods, punctuated by two or three shots. Maybe four. Who counts?

  Besides, I had a lot of other things to think about.

  Burma baby, I was thinking. You must have known, huh? Sure, you must have. But how could you? Why? What about those hungry nights and all? And your scrapboo …

  Of course. No scrapbooks. She didn’t really think I was the nuts after all. She had been pulling my leg. She’d pulled it clear off, and was running like sixty, probably 3,000 yards away by now, carrying the dismembered organ with her. All she’d ever wanted was my leg. So, now she had it. Well—if I lived, of course, which didn’t seem very likely at the moment—I intended to give her the foot that went with it.

  It didn’t seem likely I was going to live, because those enormous deadly ugly hoods were thundering this way, shooting at me, and in a trice were going to kill me.

  But I stood there thinking a little bit more. There was something I had to get clear. I have a very independent mind. Which is to say, sometimes I have no control over it at all.

  Burma, I thought, Burma O’Hare. She’d brought me here deliberately, inveigled me into the wilds, and—somehow … how?—managed to tip the hoods so they could come out here and shoot me a lot. Which, assuredly, they were going to do. But that means—sure. It meant a lot of things, many of them of more than passing interest.

  But prime among them—corroboration of previous thought, capstone to logic, the big, fat, sick, sad one—was the thought I had thought before.

  Thought before and now thought again, but this time for good and all, for ever and ever, unchangeable through all eternity:

  Dilly Pickle was a girl.

  17

  Great, I told myself; now you tell me.

  Because those ugly hoods were now twice as close as they’d been before, and shooting something fierce. Shooting wildly so far, but in a trice they were going to kill me. I was dead.

  No, not yet dead. In a trice I’d be dead.

  But in half a trice I leaped sideways what must have been, could it ever have been measured, a full fourteen feet through the air, clunking into a gnarled tree trunk, which severely bruised an arm and leg, and did my head a lot of good when it snapped over and hit a boll, or knot, or embryo limb, or whatever those extraordinarily hard lumps on tree trunks are.

  There was no point in running. Not with my head like that. Not on one leg, anyhow. Besides, I don’t run from hoods. Not if I can help it. And I could help it. So it was four-to-one, so what? Wasn’t I an ex-Marine?

  Maybe there was something about the setting, too, which addled me. The darkling sky—though the sun hadn’t set yet, it was getting darker—and the thunder of those guys’ feet, the hiss of air leaking through my teeth, the yells in my ears. It was savage, blood-heating. I could feel my features contort into a savage grimace. I went swiftly into a crouchy squat; I sent my right hand flashing—flashing like lightning—up toward my holster. Oh—ack. My arm still had such a crick in it I hit my damn belt buckle.

  Well, I’ll have to do better than that, I told myself. I started cricking my hand up toward my holster again—and even while yowling softly as the stretched and agonized muscles protested, I realized something else awful.

  I remembered putting three slugs into Skiko. And not reloading my Colt since then. Which meant there were only three slugs in the gun—three slugs, and four guys out there. Four guys getting closer.

  I’d even been able to recognize two of them by this time. One was gargantuan Fleck, farthest away but recognizable from his massive size if nothing else. Fleck, last seen at Jimmy Violet’s gate—a meaty clue if ever I’d seen one. Ahead of him was Little Phil, pumping along after a man I didn’t know. And out front, neares
t me, a tall, long-legged sprinter named Harry Reil, a mobster of British descent known to the boys as English ’Arry.

  English ’Arry was yelling excitedly, “Theah ’e is; theah’s the bahstad?” and pooping away at me with his heat.

  Long since, of course, my hand had cricked to my holster. But I was still crouching there in my squat, and I yanked and yanked, and yanked some more. What had happened was this. I’d grabbed at my holster, and that’s what I’d got: my holster.

  That was funny. Supposed to be a gun in there. A .38 Colt Special with three bullets in it; that’s what was supposed to be there. But it wasn’t. No .38 Colt Special. Not even a peashooter. How could it be?

  There was a gunshot, and a slug sped past about an inch from my head. Maybe two inches. And I was standing there sort of wonderingly running a couple of fingers around inside my empty holster. Of course, very little actual time had elapsed since I’d flown through the air like a bir—like an airplane. Possibly two seconds. And I stood there for maybe one more second, during which I thought at least a couple minutes’ worth.

  Dilly Pickle, I thought.

  Yeah. She was a dilly, all right. And she’d sure got me into a pickle. I’d had it figured backwards. Which, probably, she’d counted on.

  It was all clear as glass now. That was why she’d been loving me up, up and down, all over the place, pressing her woweewow against me, pooching her luscious wild lips at me. Turning me on temporarily had been part of her plan to turn me off permanently.

  I’d been thinking it was my savage charm—have to get that idea out of my head once and for all I guessed—which had turned her juices into jelly. She hadn’t been after my savage charm. Not even my leg. Unless it was my hawgleg. It had been my gun she was after.

  Fury rose up in me, interfering with my usual lightninglike mental processes, as I thought of Dilly Pickle. She was a goddamn picklepocket!

  No, a pickpocket.

  No, not even that. She was a pickholster.

  That’s what she’d done: She’d holstered my pickle. Boy, that was a wrong one.

  I made a tremendous effort and got it clear, lucid and shining and right, for once and for all: She had picked my holster.