“Yeah.”
“But bad, too. For both of us.”
“Go ahead and kill me, Dave, if you think it would help any.”
Flavin said, with elaborate patience, “Dave, the man is crazy. Maybe he wants publicity. Maybe he’s trying to chisel himself back on the force. Maybe he’s a masochist. But he’s nuts. I don’t believe he talked to anybody. Either make him talk, or shoot him. Or I will.”
“Will you, now?” Padway asked.
Channing said, “What are you so scared of, Flavin?”
Flavin snarled and swung his hand. Padway caught it, pulling Flavin around. He said, “Seems to me whoever killed Hank has made us all a lot of trouble. He’s maybe busted us wide open. I’d kind of like to know who did it, and why. We were working together then, Jack, remember? And nobody told me about any cop named Channing.”
Flavin shook him off. “The kid committed suicide. And don’t try manhandling me, Dave. It was my racket, remember. I let you in.”
“Why,” said Padway mildly, “that’s so, ain’t it?” He hit Flavin in the mouth so quickly that his fist made a blur in the air. Flavin fell, clawing automatically at his armpit. Padway’s men rose from the table and covered him. Flavin dropped his hand. He lay still, his eyes slitted and deadly.
Marge Krist slid down silently beside Channing’s cot. She might have been fainting, leaning forward against it, her hands out of sight. She was not fainting. Channing felt her working at his wrists.
Flavin said, “Rudy. Come here.”
Rudy Krist came into the circle of lamplight. He looked like a small boy dreaming a nightmare and knowing he can’t wake up.
Flavin said, “All right, Dave. You’re boss. Go ahead and give Channing his killer.” He looked at Rudy, and everybody else looked, too, except the men covering Flavin.
Rudy Krist’s eyes widened, until white showed all around the green. He stopped, staring at the hard, impassive faces turned toward him.
Flavin said contemptuously, “He turned you soft, Rudy. You spilled over and then you didn’t have the nerve to go through with it. You knew what would happen to you. So you shoved Hank off the pier to save your own hide.”
Rudy made a stifled, catlike noise. He leaped suddenly down onto Flavin. Padway motioned to his boys to hold it. Channing cried out desperately, “Don’t do anything. Wait! Dave, drag him off.”
Rudy had Flavin by the throat. He was frothing slightly. Flavin writhed, jerking his heels against the floor. Suddenly there was a sharp slamming noise from underneath Rudy’s body. Rudy bent his back, as though he were trying to double over backwards. He let go of Flavin. He relaxed, his head falling sleepily against Flavin’s shoulder.
Channing rolled off the cot, scrambling toward Flavin.
Flavin fired again, twice, so rapidly the shots sounded like one. One of Padway’s boys knelt down and bowed forward over his knees like a praying Jap. Another of Padway’s men fell. The second shot clipped Padway, tearing the shoulder pad of his suit.
Channing grabbed Flavin’s wrist from behind.
“Okay,” said Padway grimly. “Hold it, everybody.”
Before he got the words out a small sharp crack came from behind the cot. Flavin relaxed. He lay looking up into Channing’s face with an expression of great surprise, as though the third eye just opened in his forehead gave him a completely new perspective.
Marge Krist stood green-eyed and deadly with a little pearl-handled revolver smoking in her hand.
Padway turned toward her slowly. Channing’s mouth twitched dourly. He hardly glanced at the girl, but rolled the boy’s body over carefully.
Channing said, “Did you kill Hank?”
Rudy whispered, “Honest to God, no.”
“Did Flavin kill him?”
“I don’t know . . .” Tears came in Rudy’s eyes. “Hank,” he whispered, “I wish. . . .” The tears kept running out of his eyes for several seconds after he was dead.
By that time the police had come into the room, from the dark disused doorways, from behind the stacked liquor. Max Gandara said,
“Everybody hold still.”
Dave Padway put his hands up slowly, his eyes at first wide with surprise and then narrow and ice-hard. His gunboy did the same, first dropping his rod with a heavy clatter on the bare floor.
Padway said, “They’ve been here all the time.”
Channing sat up stiffly. “I hope they were. I didn’t know whether Max would play with me or not.”
“You dirty double-crossing louse.”
“I feel bad, crossing up an ape like you, Dave. You treated me so square, up there by Hyperion.” Channing raised his voice. “Max, look out for the boy with the chopper.”
Gandara said, “I had three men up there. They took him when he went up, real quiet.”
Marge Krist had come like a sleepwalker around the cot. She was close to Padway. Quite suddenly she fainted. Padway caught her, so that she shielded his body, and his gun snapped into his hand.
Max Gandara said, “Don’t shoot. Don’t anybody shoot.”
“That’s sensible,” said Padway softly.
Channing’s hand, on the floor, slid over the gun Flavin wasn’t using anymore. Then, very quickly, he threw himself forward into the table with the lamp on it.
A bullet slammed into the wood, through it, and past his ear, and then Channing fired twice, deliberately, through the flames.
Channing rose and walked past the fire. He moved stiffly, limping, but there was a difference in him. Padway was down on one knee, eyes shut and teeth clenched against the pain of a shattered wrist. Marge Krist was still standing. She was staring with stricken eyes at the hole in her white forearm and the pattern of brilliant red threads spreading from it.
Max Gandara caught Channing. “You crazy—”
Channing hit him, hard and square. His face didn’t change expression. “I owe you that one, Max. And before you start preaching the sanctity of womanhood, you better pry out a couple of those slugs that just missed me. You’ll find they came from Miss Krist’s pretty little popgun—the same one that killed her boy friend, Jack Flavin.” He went over and tilted Marge Krist’s face to his, quite gently. “You came out of your faint in a hurry, didn’t you, sweetheart?”
She brought up her good hand and tried to claw his eye out.
Channing laughed. He pushed her into the arms of a policeman. “It’ll all come out in the wash. Meantime, there are the bullets from Marge’s gun. The fact that she had a gun at all proves she was in on the gang. They’d have searched her, if all that pious stuff about poor Rudy’s evil ways had been on the level. She was a little surprised about Padway and sore because Flavin had kept it from her. But she knew which was the better man, all right. She was going along with Padway, and she shot Flavin to keep his mouth shut about Hank, and to make sure he didn’t get Padway by accident. Flavin was a gutty little guy, and he came close to doing just that. Marge untied me because she hoped I’d get shot in the confusion, or start trouble on my own account. If you hadn’t come in, Max, she’d probably have shot me herself. She didn’t want any more fussing about Hank Channing, and with me and Flavin dead she was in the clear.”
Gandara said with ugly stubbornness, “Sounded to me like Flavin made a pretty good case against Rudy.”
“Sure, sure. He was down on the ground with half his teeth out and three guys holding guns on him.”
Marge Krist was sitting now on the cot, while somebody worked over her with a first aid kit. Channing stood in front of her.
“You’ve done a good night’s work, Marge. You killed Rudy just as much as you did Flavin, or Hank. Rudy had decent stuff in him. You forced him into the game, but Hank was turning him soft. You killed Hank.”
Channing moved closer to her. She looked up at him, her green eyes meeting his dark ones, both of them passionate and cruel.
“You’re a smart girl, Marge. You and your mealy-mouthed hypocrisy. I know now what you meant when you accused Rudy of
being afraid to be questioned. Flavin couldn’t kill Hank by himself. He wasn’t big enough, and Hank wasn’t that dumb. He didn’t trust Flavin. But you, Marge, sure, he trusted you. He’d stand on a dark pier at midnight and talk to you, and never notice who was sneaking up behind with a blackjack.” He bent over her. “A smart girl, Marge, and a pretty one. I don’t think I’ll want to stand outside the window while you die.”
“I wish I’d killed you, too,” she whispered. “By God, I wish I’d killed you too!”
Channing nodded. He went over and sat down wearily. He looked exhausted and weak, but his eyes were alive.
“Somebody give me a cigarette,” he said. He struck the match himself. The smoke tasted good.
It was his first smoke in ten years.
FREDRIC BROWN
Fredric Brown (1906–1972) was a puckish little man who remained puckish even after a night’s drinking. No easy task, especially when all those around you are throwing punches or sleeping it off in a corner booth.
Something of this is found in most of his work, too. There’s an irony in his fiction, a sense that he’s just offstage, telling you how dangerous but amusing life is. But Brown knew that just because it might be amusing, that made life no less dangerous.
His very best work—The Fabulous Clipjoint, The Far Cry, The Screaming Mimi, Knock Three-One-Two—are about as good as it gets in crime fiction. In fact, they get richer and more haunting with the passing years. He was a master technician with the heart of a forlorn but wry poet. And no one wrote the surprise-ending short story better . . . not even O. Henry.
Don’t Look Behind You
Just sit back and relax, now. Try to enjoy this; it’s going to be the last story you ever read, or nearly the last. After you finish it you can sit there and stall awhile, you can find excuses to hang around your house, or your room, or your office, wherever you’re reading this; but sooner or later you’re going to have to get up and go out. That’s where I’m waiting for you: outside. Or maybe closer than that. Maybe in this room.
You think that’s a joke of course. You think this is just a story in a book, and that I don’t really mean you. Keep right on thinking so. But be fair; admit that I’m giving you fair warning.
Harley bet me I couldn’t do it. He bet me a diamond he’s told me about, a diamond as big as his head. So you see why I’ve got to kill you. And why I’ve got to tell you how and why and all about it first. That’s part of the bet. It’s just the kind of idea Harley would have.
I’ll tell you about Harley first. He’s tall and handsome, and suave and cosmopolitan. He looks something like Ronald Colman, only he’s taller. He dresses like a million dollars, but it wouldn’t matter if he didn’t; I mean that he’d look distinguished in overalls. There’s a sort of magic about Harley, a mocking magic in the way he looks at you; it makes you think of palaces and far-off countries and bright music.
It was in Springfield, Ohio, that he met Justin Dean. Justin was a funny-looking little runt who was just a printer. He worked for the Atlas Printing & Engraving Company. He was a very ordinary little guy, just about as different as possible from Harley; you couldn’t pick two men more different. He was only thirty-five, but he was mostly bald already, and he had to wear thick glasses because he’d worn out his eyes doing fine printing and engraving. He was a good printer and engraver; I’ll say that for him.
I never asked Harley how he happened to come to Springfield, but the day he got there, after he’d checked in at the Castle Hotel, he stopped in at Atlas to have some calling cards made. It happened that Justin Dean was alone in the shop at the time, and he took Harley’s order for the cards; Harley wanted engraved ones, the best. Harley always wants the best of everything.
Harley probably didn’t even notice Justin; there was no reason why he should have. But Justin noticed Harley all right, and in him he saw everything that he himself would like to be, and never would be, because most of the things Harley has, you have to be born with.
And Justin made the plates for the cards himself and printed them himself, and he did a wonderful job—something he thought would be worthy of a man like Harley Prentice. That was the name engraved on the card, just that and nothing else, as all really important people have their cards engraved.
He did fine-line work on it, freehand cursive style, and used all the skill he had. It wasn’t wasted, because the next day when Harley called to get the cards he held one and stared at it for a while, and then he looked at Justin, seeing him for the first time. He asked, “Who did this?”
And little Justin told him proudly who had done it, and Harley smiled at him and told him it was the work of an artist, and he asked Justin to have dinner with him that evening after work, in the Blue Room of the Castle Hotel.
That’s how Harley and Justin got together, but Harley was careful. He waited until he’d known Justin awhile before he asked him whether or not he could make plates for five- and ten-dollar bills. Harley had the contacts; he could market the bills in quantity with men who specialized in passing them, and—most important—he knew where he could get paper with the silk threads in it, paper that wasn’t quite the genuine thing, but was close enough to pass inspection by anyone but an expert.
So Justin quit his job at Atlas and he and Harley went to New York, and they set up a little printing shop as a blind, on Amsterdam Avenue south of Sherman Square, and they worked at the bills. Justin worked hard, harder than he had ever worked in his life, because besides working on the plates for the bills, he helped meet expenses by handling what legitimate printing work came into the shop.
He worked day and night for almost a year, making plate after plate, and each one was a little better than the last, and finally he had plates that Harley said were good enough. That night they had dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria to celebrate and after dinner they went the rounds of the best nightclubs, and it cost Harley a small fortune, but that didn’t matter because they were going to get rich.
They drank champagne, and it was the first time Justin ever drank champagne and he got disgustingly drunk and must have made quite a fool of himself. Harley told him about it afterward, but Harley wasn’t mad at him. He took him back to his room at the hotel and put him to bed, and Justin was pretty sick for a couple of days. But that didn’t matter, either, because they were going to get rich.
Then Justin started printing bills from the plates, and they got rich. After that, Justin didn’t have to work so hard, either, because he turned down most jobs that came into the print shop, told them he was behind schedule and couldn’t handle any more. He took just a little work, to keep up a front. And behind the front, he made five- and ten-dollar bills, and he and Harley got rich.
He got to know other people whom Harley knew. He met Bull Mallon, who handled the distribution end. Bull Mallon was built like a bull, that was why they called him that. He had a face that never smiled or changed expression at all except when he was holding burning matches to the soles of Justin’s bare feet. But that wasn’t then; that was later, when he wanted Justin to tell him where the plates were.
And he got to know Captain John Willys of the police department, who was a friend of Harley’s, to whom Harley gave quite a bit of the money they made, but that didn’t matter either, because there was plenty left and they all got rich. He met a friend of Harley’s who was a big star of the stage, and one who owned a big New York newspaper. He got to know other people equally important, but in less respectable ways.
Harley, Justin knew, had a hand in lots of other enterprises besides the little mint on Amsterdam Avenue. Some of these ventures took him out of town, usually over weekends. And the weekend that Harley was murdered Justin never found out what really happened, except that Harley went away and didn’t come back. Oh, he knew that he was murdered, all right, because the police found his body—with three bullet holes in his chest—in the most expensive suite of the best hotel in Albany. Even for a place to be found dead in Harley Prentice had chosen the best.
All Justin ever knew about it was that a long-distance call came to him at the hotel where he was staying, the night that Harley was murdered—it must have been a matter of minutes, in fact, before the time the newspapers said Harley was killed.
It was Harley’s voice on the phone, and his voice was debonair and unexcited as ever. But he said, “Justin? Get to the shop and get rid of the plates, the paper, everything. Right away. I’ll explain when I see you.” He waited only until Justin said, “Sure, Harley,” and then he said, “Attaboy” and hung up.
Justin hurried around to the printing shop and got the plates and the paper and a few thousand dollars’ worth of counterfeit bills that were on hand. He made the paper and bills into one bundle and the copper plates into another, smaller one, and he left the shop with no evidence that it had ever been a mint in miniature.
He was very careful and very clever in disposing of both bundles. He got rid of the big one first by checking in at a big hotel, not one he or Harley ever stayed at, under a false name, just to have a chance to put the big bundle in the incinerator there. It was paper and it would burn. And he made sure there was a fire in the incinerator before he dropped it down the chute.
The plates were different. They wouldn’t burn, he knew, so he took a trip to Staten Island and back on the ferry and, somewhere out in the middle of the bay, he dropped the bundle over the side into the water.
Then, having done what Harley had told him to do, and having done it well and thoroughly, he went back to the hotel—his own hotel, not the one where he had dumped the paper and the bills—and went to sleep.
In the morning he read in the newspapers that Harley had been killed, and he was stunned. It didn’t seem possible. He couldn’t believe it; it was a joke someone was playing on him. Harley would come back to him, he knew. And he was right; Harley did, but that was later, in the swamp.
But anyway, Justin had to know, so he took the very next train for Albany. He must have been on the train when the police went to his hotel, and at the hotel they must have learned he’d asked at the desk about trains for Albany, because they were waiting for him when he got off the train there.
A Century of Noir Page 14